Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
(Cento 1591 – Bologna 1666)
The Death of Dido
Oil on canvas, 287×335 cm
This masterpiece by Guercino illustrates the decisive moment of the suicide of Queen Dido, abandoned by Aeneas (Virgil, Aeneid, Book IV). While the hero’s ships recede into the background, a drama unfolds in the foreground, witnessed by his sister Anne, the maids and various characters who comment on the scene and the consequences of Aeneas’s departure, as well as those of his abandonment to passion at the expense of reason.
The Death of Dido is, in the painter’s style, a “speaking” work, narrating the vicissitudes of a sovereign, and was indeed a painting worthy of a royal destination, having been commissioned by Cardinal Bernardino Spada for Maria de’ Medici, Queen of France. When Maria’s fortunes changed and she fled to Belgium, it was Bernardino himself who bought the painting in 1631 for the sum of 400 scudi. Together with an important half-length portrait of Cardinal Spada, also in the collection, it testifies not only to the heights reached by Guercino’s painting, but to Cardinal Bernardino’s fondness for the greatest exponents of 17th-century Emilia too.
