Venus Giving Arms to Aeneas

In the eighth book of Virgil's Aeneid, Aeneas has reached Italy and faces a war with the Latins and their champion Turnus. His mother Venus has her husband Vulcan, the smith of the gods, forge him new arms, then brings them to her son in a quiet valley and lays them against an oak. Giordano kept the oak. The helmet, the brass breastplate and the greaves are propped against its trunk and hang from it, so that the tree almost seems to be wearing the armour. Light runs over the polished metal and drops away into dark. The shield, which Virgil describes over about 100 lines, is engraved with the whole future history of Rome. Giordano painted this canvas, more than two metres tall, around 1680 to 1682. By 1888 it hung in the gallery of the Grand Dukes of Oldenburg in northern Germany, though nobody knows how it got there. It was sold in Amsterdam in 1924, later belonged to the American collector Walter P. Chrysler Jr., and came to the museum in 1984.