The Trojan Women Set Fire to their Fleet

The Trojan women set fire to their ships in an effort to end years of wandering after the fall of Troy. The clouds and rain in the distance presage the storm sent by Jupiter at Aeneas’s request to quench the blaze. The artist's celebrated ability to portray light and atmospheric effects on landscape is on full display.

Claude, as the artist is mononymously known among English speakers, kept a remarkable catalogue of his own works, called the Liber Veritatis. (It is now among the holdings of the British Museum.) In it, he documented each of his own paintings with a detailed ink-and-wash drawing, often with information about the purchaser and the destination of the work on the other side of the page. In the Liber Veritatis entry for this work, Claude noted that it was painted in Rome for Girolamo Farnese (later Cardinal Farnese). The learned prelate, who returned to the city in 1643, must have chosen this episode from Virgil’s Aeneid (V:604–95) to allude to his five years of itinerant service as a papal nuncio combating Calvinism in remote Alpine cantons of the Swiss Confederation.