The World of Myth Magazine

Fires rise into the sky as Troy burns. Screams and swords clanging echo across the city, but the battle is already lost. It has been a long fight, legends say it lasted ten years, but it has led to a brutal end. Small groups of survivors are fleeing and only the gods know their fates. Among them is the Trojan prince Aeneas and his family.

People have imagined the end of the Trojan War many times, but perhaps the most dramatic version is still in Virgil’s Aeneid. In that epic Virgil’s hero, Aeneas, flees Troy and spends several years exploring the Mediterranean and looking for a new homeland, eventually setting the foundations for the Romans. At one point in Virgil’s story he lands in Carthage, where he describes how the Greeks savaged Troy to Dido, the queen of Carthage. When he is telling his story to her he is a refugee in a strange land, but we should not assume he is making it up or exaggerating the drama for sympathy. Aeneas is many things, but he is not a liar, and his description of Troy’s fall in book two of The Aeneid is brutal and chaotic – showing ‘man’s inhumanity to man’.

There has not been a large amount of art inspired by Virgil’s epic, and that is surprising. It is so rich with drama and imagery that much more could be done with it. It certainly is famous enough, although perhaps not quite as well-known or read these days as the Homeric epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey. ‘Aeneas’ Flight from Troy’ by Federico Barocci (1533 – 1612) is one example of Aeneid inspired art, showing the hero with his father Anchises on his back and his children at his side. When looking at it you can feel the drama and horror of the scene radiating from the painting: it feels like Aeneas’ story in Virgil’s poem.

Seen from inside some kind of a building or archway, the whole frame forces us focus on the characters as they flee from the destruction visible in the street behind them. People are moving around in the background, and it is unclear if they are fighting or if they are, like Aeneas, attempting to flee as well. From the architectural details we can see a very developed, classically inspired Troy - we will get back to this in more detail, but because those background details are darkened and the use of light in the forefront, our immediate focus is on Aeneas as he leads his family into an uncertain future.

The sense of the movement in this painting is really interesting. Barrocci's previous paintings were often a single moment captured in time, with characters in the act of moving around the scene, such as 1597’s Nativity:

Paintings like this one show that Barocci had, and was continuing to develop, a keen sense of action in his work which is on full display here in ‘Aeneas’ flight from Troy’. You can easily imagine the few seconds before and the few seconds after this snapshot of a scene, with Aeneas struggling under the weight of his own father on his back while also trying to lead his family to safety through the street fighting. This image is one of horror, but also ultimately of a small hope that they can escape and begin anew somewhere else.

It is difficult to not see the symbolism here when you remember the story of The Aeneid. Aeneas is leading his family, and so leading the future Roman people while carrying his father on his back – symbolically carrying the weight of experience or tradition into the future the Romans (his children) will be ‘birthed’ and ‘mature’ from.

This scene was painted twice by Barocci, both times for wealthy patrons. One patron (it seems, records have been largely lost) was Emperor Rudolph II of Austria, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the other was Cardinal Giuliano Della Rovere of the Papal States, at the time a country ruled by the Catholic Church. With patronage always comes expectations of the work’s contents, like how the Medici’s commission of Botticelli to paint ‘The Birth of Venus’ dictated the symbolism and style of that work.

Much of the documentation around this painting has been lost, or is otherwise difficult to find, but through the symbolism we can made inferences into the meaning of this painting. Looking behind Aeneas and his family you will see a Troy whose architecture is very reminiscent of Ancient Rome. If the Troy described in Homer ever existed, it would absolutely not have looked anything like this. This background is echoing the ‘future’ of Aeneas’ line and the Roman empire he would plant the seed of, suggesting that like Troy, Rome too would have eventually burnt.

This is suggesting a cyclical nature to history, a popular idea that has existed for centuries, that great civilizations will naturally rise and fall across the years in more or less the same way. With great power comes great danger, and it is always useful for any leader who imagines they are great and powerful to remember this. People in positions of power cannot become complacent, because all things (even the greatest of empires) will eventually fall. When this painting was finished the glory days of the Roman Empire were already long in the past – and the power of both the Papal States and the Holy Roman Empire were on the decline. Instead by the 1500s, the empires of Spain, England and France were on the rise, who eventually would dominate Europe and the world.

One way of seeing this painting is this: as one civilization falls, like Troy, another will eventually rise to take its place, like Rome, which will itself fall and another power will rise in its place. It is a warning, but there is also a hope too - small yet fertile as it is. Great things can grow from small seeds. But you can see this painting as both tragic and tragically heroic. You can see it as heroic and hopeful. Or you can see it as simply the start of a new cycle: Aeneas fleeing Troy will lead eventually to another Aeneas fleeing another burning Troy, and another after that. Barocci’s message is ultimately ambiguous, and the viewers themselves must decide what message they take from this piece. They are the ones who must decide what it means for them.