Virgil

Prince Eugene of Savoy, the Habsburg general, wanted the great writers of antiquity above the doors of the library in his new Upper Belvedere, and around 1720 painters from Bologna delivered several of them. This is the Roman poet Virgil, young and crowned with laurel, sitting on the ground with one arm flung toward the sky. Around him are things a reader of Virgil would recognise. A trumpet lies at his feet, the instrument of heroic verse like his Aeneid. High up, what look like bees drift past, and bees fill a whole book of his poem on farming, the Georgics. Swans, birds long linked with poets, float on the water below a distant town. The Belvedere gives the canvas to Giacomo Antonio Boni. It was once placed in the circle of Donato Creti, a leading Bolognese painter.