Читать книгу A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools - National Gallery (Great Britain) - Страница 104

Gaspard Poussin (French: 1613-1675). See 31.

Dido, Queen of Carthage, enamoured of the Trojan Æneas, the destined founder of Rome, sought to detain him by strategy within her dominions. The goddess Juno, who had espoused Dido's cause, contrived that a storm should befall when the Queen and her guests were on a hunting party (Æneid, iv. 119). In front of the cave a Cupid holds the horse of Æneas, and two others are fluttering above. High in the clouds is Juno, accompanied by Venus, who had contrived all this for Dido's undoing.

As for the execution of the picture, "the stormy wind blows loudly through its leaves, but the total want of invention in the cloud-forms bears it down beyond redemption. Look at the wreaths of cloud (?), with their unpleasant edges cut as hard and solid and opaque and smooth as thick black paint can make them, rolled up over one another like a dirty sail badly reefed"93 (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. iii. ch. iv. § 23; vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. ii. ch. ii. § 18).