I received an email via my website contact page from a student from Belgium who for her course of Latin has to talk about an artwork about Dido & Aeneas. She asked me the following several questions:
- I would like to learn more about your series.
- You say that the paintings represent the feeling of Aeneas when he's leaving the city.
- What is then the difference between each painting of the serie?
- Why did you chose the topic of Dido and Aeneas?
- What's your vision on the topic of DIdo and Aeneas?
- Is there something symbolic in the paintings?
I answered her
questions this way:
Thank you very much for looking at and enjoying my work.
I have done some reading, in English, of the classics because they are great stories with universal impact.
Dido's story is a woman's struggle; at Tyre her brother kills her husband, she escapes to Carthage, founds the city, cleverly lays out its walls, builds a home for her people and is judged to be a wise ruler.
So even though the Aeneid is the story of the founding myth of Rome and thus of Aeneas' wanderings, at its heart is Dido's lament and the pyre she builds to immolate herself.
Stanley Lombardo's translation, in Book 4, at lines 689-708:
"O God!" she said. "Will he get away,
Will this interloper make a mockery of us?
To arms, the whole city after him!
Launch the fleet! Bring fire, man the oars!
What am I saying? Where am I?
What has come over me? Oh, Dido, only now
Do you feel your guilt? Better to have felt it
When you gave away your crown. Behold
The pledge, the loyalty of the man they say
Bears his ancestral gods, bore on his shoulders
His age-worn father! Could I not have torn him
Limb from limb and fed him to the fishes?
Murdered his friends? Minced Ascanius himself
And served him up as a meal to his father?
The battle could have gone either way: What of it?
Doomed to die, whom did I have to fear?
I should have torched his camp with my own hands,
And thrown myself on top of the conflagration.
So, I see these images and the story, as not so much of Trojan Aeneas' journey to Rome and glory as the founder of a successful patriarchal dynasty, but more of Dido's lament and her funeral pyre. She immolated herself out of deep regret, guilt at giving herself to his ambitions, and the realization that she'd let down her people.
Is there a difference between each painting of the series? There basically is no difference between the paintings, they are variations on a theme.
You ask is there something symbolic in the paintings? If there's any overt symbolism is the bits of red paint scattered into the black. Could be that red is the fire and black is the soot and ashes. I prefer not to overstate symbolism in my work, but let the viewer do their own thinking.
Once again, thank you ever so much for looking at my work, enjoying it, and for giving me the opportunity to do some thinking and explication of it. Hopefully, this makes sense to you.
I wish you continued success in your studies.
What do these three artists have in common? That as they became aged and aging artists they became much more interested in paint and its physicality, sometimes to the point of obscuring what they were depicting.
