# Aeneas' Flight from Troy [View the canonical artwork record]() ## Artwork - Artist: [BAROCCI, Federico Fiori]() - Date: 1551-1600 - Technique: Oil on canvas, 179 x 253 cm ## Commentary Federico Barrocci's Aeneas' Flight from Troy with Anchises, his son Ascanius and his wife Creusa is the second version painted in 1598 of a picture executed ten years earlier for Emperor Rudolf II of Austria. Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere presented Cardinal Scipione with this second version, which entered the Borghese collection before 1613. It was this painting that inspired Cardinal Scipione to commission a large marble group on the same subject from Gian Lorenzo Bernini \(also in the Borghese Gallery\). The myth of Aeneas, ancestor of Romulus and Remus, referred to the birth of Rome and thus confirmed the Borghese family's high status in the city. Barrocci's many drawings of nature led him to achieve a spontaneity and naturalness in movement, colour and airy effects, and a silvery luminosity that was to influence the 17th-century masters, particularly Rubens. Never before had flames been painted so close to, with an energy suggesting even the crackle of the fire, from which Ascanius seems to be protecting himself by covering his ears. But the human delicacy of Barrocci's anti-heroic and anti-rhetorical figures was not to be really appreciated in Rome, because it could not compete with the classical antique statuary. ## Related artworks - [Aeneas' Flight from Troy \(detail\)]() - [Annunciation]() - [Annunciation]() - [Double Portrait with the Della Rovere Family Emblem]() - [Face of a Woman with Downcast Eyes]() - [Francesco II della Rovere]() - [La Madonna del Gatto]() - [Madonna del Popolo]() - [Male Figure Stooping to Lift a Cauldron]() - [Portrait of a Gentleman]() - [Portrait of a Young Lady]() - [Portrait of a Young Woman]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()