The Aeneid in Art, Music, and Literature

As we have seen, on the ideological level Virgil’s readers looked into his poem and saw themselves reflected there. On the artistic level, the same thing happened. Two initial examples taken from early illustrated editions of the Aeneid will show how this process works. First, let us turn again to the 1502 Brant-Gruninger edition mentioned above (Figure 42.1). The characters in this illustration are dressed in costumes from the turn of the sixteenth century, not from ancient Rome, and the wooden ring within which the heroes fight, along with the armor and weapons stacked behind it, suggest that Aeneas and Turnus have just finished a battle according to the conventions of medieval warfare. What is more, the cities in the background look like the northern European cities of Brant and Gruninger’s day, not the Roman ruins that were still visible in much of southern Europe. In short, this picture blends the Roman world of the Aeneid with the late medieval world of the illustrator. A similar blending occurs in our next illustration, an engraving that accompanied John Dryden’s influential English translation in an edition of 1716 (Figure 42.2). Here again, the artist has visualized a key moment from the Aeneid in terms of the

Figure 42.1 Publii Virgilii Maronis opera (Strasbourg: Johannes Gruninger, 1502), fo. 407v. Princeton University Library.

Prevailing aesthetic of his day. The subject of the engraving is the death of Dido, but the scene is dominated not by Dido, but by Iris, who is depicted at the very moment of descent, which demands the greatest technical skill to execute. The foreshortening is not so severe as in, for example, Tintoretto’s Miracle of St Mark, but here, too, we are encouraged to admire the skill of the artist in controlling a difficult composition. The scene unfolds on a city square that was clearly constructed on the model of, say, Il Gesii in Rome, showing the dissociation of form from function that characterizes the architecture of this period. In other words, the engraving is typically baroque, and once again, the Aeneid serves as a mirror in which the observers, intentionally or not, see themselves (Kallendorf2001: 124-8).

The same thing happens when we turn from the early editions ofthe Aeneid to works of art derived from it. For example, wealthy families in Renaissance Italy often commissioned for their children a special wedding gift, a cassone, or large chest, into which clothing,

Figure 42.2 Aeneid 4.690-5, from The Works of Virgil... Translated into English Verse, by Mr. Dryden (London: Jacob Tonson, 1716), vol. 2, following p. 454. Princeton University Library.

Linens, and the like could be stored. These cassoni were decorated with pictures, often derived from literary sources. One of the most famous painters of such pictures was Apollonio di Giovanni, whose workshop in Florence produced a number of wedding chests with scenes derived from the Aeneid. On one of them, a cassone now in the Yale

University Art Gallery, we can see a scene in which Aeneas founds Rome, the city to which the young couple who received the wedding chest ultimately traced their ancestry. Apollonio di Giovanni also painted the miniatures in a manuscript of Virgil’s works now in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence (MS. 492). The scene (fol. 62r) where Juno visits Aeolus to ask him to release the winds and cause a storm (Aen. 1.65-75) is also found on the Yale wedding chest, where the gods wear clothing from the fifteenth century ce, not the first century bce. In other words, the painter who looked for inspiration in the Aeneid saw the poem through the lens of his own culture, producing luxury objects which celebrated the power and lineage of the family that commissioned them (Fagiolo 1981: 224-7).

The Aeneid also served as inspiration for decorative items in other domestic spheres. For example, in the sophisticated court culture of northern and central Italian cities including Mantua, Ferrara, and Urbino, artists - among them Benvenuto cellini and Michelangelo - designed objects such as gold saltcellars and silver inkwells that could be used as impressive gifts to advance diplomatic ends. With this goal in mind, Duke Guidobaldo II of Urbino ordered two sets of ceramic plates to be prepared from designs by Battista Franco as gifts for the Emperor charles V and cardinal Alessandro Farnese. Included among these plates were scenes from the Trojan War as depicted in Book 2 of the Aeneid, including the Trojan horse (Aen. 2.255), the flame that touches Ascanius’ head (Aen. 2.683), and Aeneas leading his family away from Troy (Aen. 2.1130-83). These scenes show a close alliance among artist, patron, and scholar. The depiction of Aeneas leading his family away from Troy (Figure 42.3), for example, depends not only on Virgil’s text but also on Servius’ commentary to it, suggesting that a humanist such as Annibal caro or Pietro Aretino, known to be at Guidobaldo’s court when the designs for these plates were made in the middle of the sixteenth century, must have had a hand in their production. And it is certainly no accident that the humanist duke turned for his subject to the Aeneid, given Charles V’s well-known interest in tracing his descent from the Trojan prince. The clothing in these scenes looks more Roman than that in Apollonio di Giovanni’s wedding chest, but the scenes are surrounded by borders in which armed putti and embracing couples entwine themselves in a typical mannerist fantasy (Fagiolo 1981: 245-8), showing that once again, the subject matter of the past is seen through the stylistic lens of the present.

Not all appropriations of the Aeneid, however, enter into the machinations of the high and mighty. Plaquettes, for example, could be made in silver, but they were commonly made of bronze and could be made even more cheaply in lead, allowing their diffusion to all social classes as ornaments for everything fTom boxes to mirrors. Hercules and Cacus, for example, appear on the famous silver inkwell made by Cristoforo Foppa (called Caradosso) for Giovanni d’Aragona, but there is a version in lead as well as the original one in silver. Prints, too, were cheap enough to be widely diffused, such that Andrea Briosco (called Il Riccio) found it easy to obtain a copy of Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving of Raphael’s death of Dido and make a bronze plaquette from it. These plaquettes range in quality from high to low, often showing mastery of the latest artistic techniques, but as Peter Flotner’s illustration of Dido shows, it remained difficult to envision Virgil’s world consistently in its own terms, for the Carthaginian queen is placed in the square of a German city with towered circular buildings, balconied houses, and a square fountain typical of sixteenth-century northern European architecture (Fagiolo 1981: 234-44).

Passages from the Aeneid also guided the artistry of a number of popular spectacles through the ages. Each year, for example, the King of Naples presented to the Pope a white horse as a recognition of his obligations to his feudal lord. This presentation was generally accompanied by a big celebration, in which a temporary structure with a relevant

Figure 42.3 Ceramic plate depicting the flight of Aeneas from Troy. Museo Civico, Pesaro.

Theme was constructed, then blown apart in a fireworks display. The neoclassical structure that was exploded on September 9, 1730 in Piazza SS. Apostoli in Rome during the presentation to Pope Clement XII alludes specifically to the fall of Troy and to Aeneas, and the motto that accompanies the structure is taken directly from the Aeneid: ‘‘Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem imperiumque’’ (‘‘so great an effort it was to found the Roman people and their empire,’’ Aen. 1.33-4). A similar structure was exploded in Piazza Farnese on June 29, 1744, when the white horse from Naples was presented to Pope Benedict XIV. An engraving of this structure shows a scene from Book 6 of the Aeneid, in full-blown neoclassical style, in which Aeneas descends to the Underworld (Fagiolo 1981: 255-61). What is more, the tournaments that remained so popular in the chivalric culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance traced their origins to the Troiae lusus, the equestrian exercises of Ascanius and the other young Trojans at the funeral games for Anchises in Aen. 5.838-44. The choreography of these exercises, which parallels certain types of dancing popular in this period, was associated with the labyrinth of Crete (Aen. 5.831-3). This association provides a deeper significance to these events, which took on overtones of a sacred cosmological dance: that is, the tournaments were generally held in the spring, when the general return to life recalled the descent to the Underworld and the return to the world of light (Fagiolo 1981: 261; Greene 2001: 408-15).

When we move to the so-called ‘‘major arts’’ (i. e., painting and sculpture), we find that works derived from the Aeneid are grouped around the points of greatest emotional tension in Virgil’s text, visualized in accordance with a succession of stylistic and cultural norms. The first group focuses on Book 2, the fall of Troy. Early on, the invading Greek army suddenly disappeared and a mysterious wooden horse was found outside the walls of Troy. A Trojan priest, Laocoon, warned against taking the horse into the city; two serpents promptly swam ashore and wrapped themselves around Laocoon and his sons, crushing them to death in a mass of agonized screams and writhing limbs. This group of figures was the subject of a famous sculpture from the Hellenistic era, which was discovered in Rome in 1506. The mannered style of the sculpture resonated immediately with the mannerism of the early sixteenth century, such that Laocoon’s death became the subject of a print by Marcantonio Raimondi, a fresco in the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua by Rinaldo Mantovano, and other works. largely to the deception of Sinon, Laocoon’s warnings were ignored and the horse was brought into Troy, where it disgorged a group of hidden Greek warriors, who opened the gates to the Greek army and began the final destruction of the city. This final battle appealed in particular to the same mannerist aesthetic, as seen in an anonymous sixteenth-century print (Figure 42.4), where the invaders and defenders prove almost indistinguishable from one another amidst the jumbled confusion of falling buildings and muscled torsos. In the midst of this confusion, Aeneas took the household gods and his family members out of the city in one of the most famous scenes in the Aeneid. This scene was freely absorbed into any context in which Virgilian pietas (‘‘piety’’) might

Figure 42.4 Anonymous sixteenth-century woodcut depicting the fall of Troy.

Be appropriate, such as Raphael’s Fire in the Borgo, a fresco in the Vatican palace in which, while Pope Leo IV made the sign of the cross and extinguished a fire that had broken out in ninth-century Rome, a man leads his son away from the flames with his aged father on his back. Again, however, the emotional content of the scene and its focus on movement and physical effort made it especially attractive to mannerist and baroque artists such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini, whose famous sculpture of these figures still stands in the villa of the Roman family that commissioned it.

Other artistic works were inspired by Aeneas’s encounter with Dido in Carthage. Among an important group of Virgilian landscapes by the seventeenth-century French painter Claude Lorrain is one in which Aeneas surveys the city of Carthage with Dido. This painting, like the others in the series, places a small group of people into a landscape in which they are dwarfed by the natural features, and by the classical buildings, some of them half-ruined, that encroach upon it. These paintings powerfully capture a moment of delicate balance, between a disappearing countryside and rapid urbanization, between the optimism of renewing a culture based on antiquity and the pessimism of knowing that its decay will inevitably follow. Claude’s scenes in turn influenced the series that J. M. W. Turner painted in the middle of the nineteenth century to illustrate Book 4 of the Aeneid. Turner drew from Claude his ability to place heroic figures into an ominous, brooding landscape, but as his Dido Building Carthage shows, he was able to infuse the scene with a new monumentality that drives home its power as a warning against the moral threats posed by the wealth of a rapidly industrializing age. As Aeneas’ relationship with Dido ends, the tragedy that results has proven especially susceptible to changes in taste and cultural norms. Andrea Mantegna’s grisaille, for example, shows a restrained suffering in accordance with Renaissance norms; in the seventeenth-century painting by G. Coli and F. Gherardi, Dido expires in a flurry of emotion and movement at the base of a structure that closely resembles Bernini’s tabernacle at the main altar in St Peter’s in Rome; while the Dido of Pompeo Batoni (1708-87) looks up at the departing Aeneas with a full measure of neoclassical restraint (Fagiolo 1981: 105-9, 194-217; Llewellyn 1984: 117-40; McKay 1993: 351-64).

These works inspired by the emotional high points of the Aeneid come together in more than a dozen cycles, painted between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries to decorate palaces in central and northern Italy. These cycles project the power and prestige of the men who commissioned them, men such as Andrea Doria, the Genoese admiral who arranged a depiction of the shipwreck of Aeneas in which Jupiter was identified with the Emperor Charles V and Doria himself appeared as Neptune, positioned on the same plane as the imperial deity because mastery of the sea had been granted to him. As we would expect, each of these powerful patrons saw the Aeneid through the prism of his own culture. Giulio Boiardo, for example, commissioned a cycle of frescoes around 1540 for his ancestral home at La Rocca Di Scandiano in which the painter Nicolca dell’Abate made Virgil’s poem compatible with the chivalric world of the Orlando innamorato, written by Giulio’s ancestor, Matteo Maria Boiardo. The contemporaneous Sala dell’Eneide in the Palazzo Spada in Rome in turn relies on the Virgilian exegesis of the Neoplatonist Cristoforo Landino, in which the obstacles that Aeneas overcame parallel the purificatory process by which the Christian soul returns to its heavenly father. This synthesis reflects the interests and beliefs of the man who commissioned it, Gerolamo Capodiferro (150259), who received his humanist education in Sadoleto’s circle and occupied a series of important positions in the Papal court of Paul III. This Christian Neoplatonism was raised to an even higher level in the Galleria di Enea in Rome’s Palazzo Doria Pamphili in Piazza Navona, where Pietro da Cortona used the Aeneid to prefigure the transfer of the true religion from east to west; here Juno and Venus, the lily and the dove, the active and contemplative lives of Neoplatonism, are reconciled in the heraldic emblem of the Pam-phili, the family of Pope Innocent X, who owned the palace. When allegorical interpretations like these fell out of favor in the eighteenth century, the Aeneid was seen once again in literal terms, so that a group of martial scenes from Book I were chosen to decorate the walls of the royal armory in Turin. These scenes are suffused with the heroic dignity of neoclassicism, while the slightly later cycle in the Sala di Enea e Didone in the Villa Borghese in Rome passes from allegory to neoclassical heroism to the first traces of a new preromantic sensibility (Fagiolo 1981: 120-93).

In music, the fourth book of the Aeneid (containing the tragedy of Dido) was the most influential, followed by the second book (on the fall of Troy), demonstrating again the tendency to engage the text at its points of greatest emotional tension. As early as the ninth and tenth centuries, manuscripts of the Aeneid were marked with neumes, or guidance for singing verses from these two books. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the musicians Josquin des Prez, Orlando di Lasso, and Adrian Willaert began composing settings of dulces exuviae, Dido’s farewell to Aeneas (Aen. 4.651ff.), but settings of Virgil’s own words have proved less important than works inspired by them. Once again, Book 4 provided the inspiration for Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, which has become the most famous of a group of operas based on Dido’s story, but Pietro Metastasio wrote a libretto, Didone abbandonata, that was set to music almost once a year between 1724 and 1824, and individual arias for this libretto were also composed by such major figures as Mozart and Schubert. By the nineteenth century, themes from classical literature were becoming less common on stage, which makes the appearance of Hector Berlioz’s monumental opera, Les Troyens, all the more striking. The work’s length also delayed its production, but finally in 1969, a hundred years after the composer’s death, a complete performance of the entire four-hour production was mounted (Draheim 1993: 317-44).

Virgil’s impact on western literature is quite literally incalculable, ranging from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Forster and Conrad, but his impact has been most significant on those post-classical poets who also wrote epic. Dante’s Divine Comedy is not, strictly speaking, an epic, but it is clear from his choice of Virgil as his initial guide in the poem and as the master of lo bello stilo (‘‘the pleasing style,’’ Inf. 1.87) that has brought him honor, that Dante envisioned his poem as part of this tradition. On the most basic level, the relationship is verbal: Dante quotes Virgil’s poetry more than two hundred times, more than any sources other than the Bible and Aristotle; the phrase selva antica (‘‘ancient wood,’’ Purg. 28.23) comes directly from Aen. 6.179. Other references involve details of plot, as when Dante-pilgrim tries three times to embrace the shade of a musician named Casella (Purg. 2.80-1) in the same way as Aeneas had tried to embrace Anchises (Aen. 6.700-2). As any reader of the Divine Comedy knows, however, Virgil occupies a greater, and ultimately more ambiguous, role in Dante’s poem. By selecting Virgil rather than, say, Aristotle as his guide, Dante clearly intended to honor him as the foremost representative of ancient culture. Modern scholarship, however, emphasizes Virgil’s shortcomings in the poem. In Inferno 20, for example, Dante has Virgil correct his own text by putting into his mouth an account of the founding of Mantua that contradicts the one in the Aeneid. Even as a character in the poem, Virgil is a flawed guide, faltering at the Gate of Dis in Inferno 8-9 and reacting foolishly to the demons in Inferno 21-3. Finally, in Purgatorio 30, Virgil withdraws from the poem, first by quoting a line from his Aeneid (6.883), then by translating another line (Aen. 4.23), and finally by echoing a passage from his Georgics (4.525-7). Indeed Virgil had to withdraw fTom the Divine Comedy., for he remained a pagan even though his poetry should have led him, like Statius in Purgatorio 22.40-1, to repentance and conversion to Christianity. Thus, as the author of the Aeneid, Virgil occupies for Dante the same ambivalent position he occupies in medieval culture in general: an author whose work represents the best that the classical past can offer, while remaining suspect for its pagan underpinnings (Hollander 1993: 253-69; Kallendorf 2000: 7-8).

Unlike the Divine Comedy, there is no confusion about the genre of Petrarch’s Africa: it is clearly an epic, written in the language and form of the Aeneid. The poem follows one of the major figures of Roman republican history, Scipio Africanus, from his invasion of Africa through his victory over the Carthaginians at the battle of Zama to a triumphal celebration in Rome. The Africa draws on other sources, to be sure, but it is also an imitation of Virgilian epic. Scipio’s dream at the beginning, for example, is obviously modelled on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis and the commentary to it written by Macrobius, but it also takes from Virgil a parade of Roman heroes, a Platonizing discourse on why suicide is wrong, and a view of history played out against the backdrop of a moral universe. And while the battles of the last four books recount information fTom Livy, they also draw from the last six books of the Aeneid, as Petrarch understood them. For Petrarch, Virgil’s epic sought to praise the virtues of its hero Aeneas and condemn the vices of those like Turnus and Dido who opposed him. Petrarch therefore describes the warring armies in black and white terms, assigning pietas (‘‘piety’’) to Scipio and furor (‘‘fury’’), dolus (‘‘fraud’’), and rabies (‘‘madness’’) to Hannibal. And lest the moral lines blur, the dalliance with Dido is rewritten so that the Dido figure, Sophonisba, consorts not with Scipio but with Massinissa, his chief lieutenant. The resulting poem strikes modern readers as less than successful. Its main problem, its relentless moralizing, results directly from how the Aeneid itself was understood by Petrarch, which was matched by those who followed him in the Renaissance revival of learning (Kallendorf 1989: 19-57).

Spenser’s The Faerie Queene in turn shows what happens when Virgil’s poem is incorporated into the Protestant culture of Elizabeth I’s England. The medieval and Renaissance commentators to the Aeneid had stressed the roles of reason, labor, and merited reward in the poem: that is, Aeneas worked hard to understand how he should act and grew into a heroism that reaps the rewards that are due to hard work and self-denial. To a Protestant like Spenser, however, this interpretation smacked of works righteousness. The Reformation emphasized that salvation comes by faith alone, so that in Book I of The Faerie Queene, Spenser rewrites the Polydorus episode as a parable on grace and Aeneas’ departure from Carthage, previously allegorized as a triumph of the will, as the infusion of grace into a reformed Redcrosse through the supernatural agency of Una and Arthur. Duessa’s descent into Aesculapius’ lair parodies Aeneas’ descent to the Underworld, but Redcrosse’s instruction in the House of Holinesse corrects the parody, emphasizing the need to trust in the mercy of God. In Book 2, Spenser rewrites the Dido story repeatedly, making Phaedria and Acrasia into concupiscent Didos based on Aeneid 4 and Alma, Medina, and Belphoebe into chaste Didos of the non-Virgilian historical tradition, surrogates for Elizabeth I. In Book 3, however, Spenser returns to the chaste Dido and suggests, through Britomart, that married love can and should reconcile public and private, so that Spenser can express his anxieties about Elizabeth’s failure to produce an heir by referring to the Protestant preference for chastity within marriage (Watkins 1995: 90-178).

Like Spenser, Milton turned to the Aeneid in writing a religious epic with an argument ‘‘Not less but more heroic’’ (Paradise Lost 9.14) than the pagan literature on which it was based. In recounting the Fall from Paradise, Milton tells how evil, aroused by Satan, is converted by God to good. The structure of his poem rewrites the Aeneid, where Juno, like Satan, is motivated by a sense of injured merit (Aen. 1.27; PL 1.98) and tormented by the thought of lasting pain that results from an unfavorable judgment (Aen. 1.36; PL 1.55), then stirs up war by releasing a monster, Allecto in the model (Aen. 7), Sin in the imitation (PL 2). Milton’s twelve-book division echoes Virgil’s, as does his distinctive high style, noticeably coordinate and marked by verbal repetition, enjambement, theme and variation, and repetition of phrase to clarify meaning. In terms of both language and thought, Milton’s characteristic procedure is to transcend his source while leaving deliberate evidence of it. For example, Michael’s prophecy of Israel’s royal house, which will lead to Christ, ends like this:

He shall ascend The throne hereditary, and bound his reign With earth’s wide bounds, his glory with the heavens.

(PL 12.369-71)

This recalls Jupiter’s prophecy about Augustus, ‘‘imperium Oceano, famam qui terminet astris’’ (‘‘whose power will extend to the sea, and fame to the stars,’’ Aen. 1.287), but it also recalls Anchises’ prophecy in Book 6, ‘‘illa incluta Roma, imperium terris, animos aequabit Olympo’’ (‘‘that famous Rome will make her empire equal to the earth, and her spirit to heaven,’’ Aen. 6.781-2). These two allusions guide us in turning from the city of man to the city of God, in a process which works the same way throughout the poem: we recognize the allusion at the same time as we correct it, so that we are tempted by the beauty of the past just as Christ was tempted by Satan in Paradise Regained, but like Christ, we have the means for distinguishing true from false and are expected to judge accordingly (Gransden 1984). The poem that results cannot help but bring the epic tradition per se to a close, in that the new Christian heroism surpasses the pagan heroism of old but cannot itself be surpassed in turn.

As Ernst Robert Curtius has eloquently argued, the unity of European culture that extends from Homer (see the chapters by Edwards and Slatkin) to Goethe, in which Virgil plays such a significant role, has been irrevocably shattered in the twentieth century (Curtius 1953: 3-16). Part of this is undoubtedly due to changes in education, for Virgil’s role in modern culture has inevitably declined along with the study of Latin in the schools. Thus in music, for example, there simply have not been very many references to the Aeneid in the twentieth century (Draheim 1993: 334-5), and the author of the most significant modern literary adaptation, Hermann Broch, actually knew very little about either Virgil himself or his Aeneid. When there are more precise references, they are increasingly filtered through a ‘‘pessimistic’’ perspective that sees Virgil not as the supporter of Rome and her imperial vision, but as an author whose sympathies really lay with the victims of wealth and power, a veiled critic of the status quo who merited appropriation by, for example, the opponents of the Vietnam war (Thomas 2001: xi). Imitations of Virgil, therefore, tend toward irony (Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave) and parody (Anthony Burgess’s A Vision of Battlements) (Ziolkowski 1993: 134-45, 203-22).

The basic pattern that prevailed in preceding centuries, however, continues to shape this modified Virgilian reception. Between the two world wars, for example, different local situations produced different Virgils: in Italy, as a nationalist countryman with traditional views on government and work; in France, as a protofascist shaped by Parisian student life; in Germany, as a spirit almost Christian by nature who could stand against the emergence of National Socialism; and in Latin America, as a prophet of peace sent providentially to prepare the way for Christ (Ziolkowski 1993: 56). Thus while the number of Virgil’s readers gradually declined through the twentieth century, the variety of perspectives brought to the text rose. It is impossible to say what the twenty-first century will bring, but in one way or another, the Aeneid will undoubtedly remain a mirror into which new generations of readers will look and see themselves.