Il ramo d'oro

Turner showed this at the Royal Academy in 1834, and it comes from Book Six of Virgil's Aeneid. The woman holding up the branch is the Cumaean Sibyl, the prophetess who guides the Trojan hero Aeneas down into the land of the dead. The bough of gold in her hand is the token that lets a living man make that journey and return. Turner sets the scene on the shore of Lake Avernus, a real crater lake near Naples that the Romans took for an entrance to the underworld, and which he had seen for himself on his Italian travels. Small figures of the Fates dance to one side, and a snake coils in the grass at the Sibyl's feet.