Didon

Fuseli had been in London only a couple of years when he sent this to the Royal Academy exhibition of 1781, and he picked the subject to go head to head with Joshua Reynolds, the Academy's grand president, who was showing his own Dido in the same rooms that year. The queen of Carthage lies dead across the funeral pyre she built after Aeneas sailed away, his sword still bloody at her side. The winged figure leaning over her is Iris, sent down to cut a single lock of Dido's hair and release her soul, since she has died before her time and by her own hand. Fuseli liked to talk about supreme beauty in the jaws of death, and that is plainly what he was reaching for in the pale, exposed body stretched along the flames.