Ascanio che uccide il cervo di Silvia

Claude Lorrain painted this in 1682, the last year of his life, when he was about 82 and had spent six decades composing idealised landscapes in Rome. The commission came from Prince Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna, his great patron in old age. The story is from Virgil's Aeneid: the young Ascanius, son of Aeneas, draws his bow at a stag in the calm Italian countryside, not knowing it is the tame pet of a local girl named Silvia. The shot will start a war. Claude sets that small violent act inside a vast golden evening, tiny against the trees and the far hills. He seems not to have quite finished it, and unlike almost all his work he never recorded it in the drawing-book where he copied out his completed paintings.