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| Virgil's Tomb by Moonlight, with Silius Italicus Declaiming |
Artist:Joseph Wright (Wright of Derby) (British, Derby 1734–1797 Derby)
Date:1779
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:40 x 50 in. (101.6 x 127 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, Gifts of Mrs. William M. Haupt, Josephine Bay Paul, and Estate of George Quackenbush, in his memory, by exchange, The Morris and Alma Schapiro Fund Gift, and funds from various donors, 2013
Accession Number:2013.155
Wright depicts a site that had long been a popular destination for visitors to Naples. Indeed he could reasonably expect that Londoners who viewed this painting at the Royal Academy in 1779 would recognize the tomb of Virgil (70–19 B.C.), author of the Aeneid. Perhaps more obscure is the figure, Silius Italicus, the Roman orator who commemorated the anniversary of the great poet’s death each year by reading his verses aloud within the tomb. As a meditation on mortality, Wright fittingly contrasts the flickering glow of the lantern and the silvery moonlight spreading over the landscape.
Catalogue Entry
Joseph Wright was unusual among English artists in that, although trained in London, he spent the greater part of his life in the Midlands. The son of an attorney, he was interested in astronomy and geology, and he was also aware of the new technologies arising from industrialization. Wright earned his living painting portraits. His experiments with genre subjects and light effects suggest that he studied not only the old masters but the followers of Caravaggio. Neither a student nor a Grand Tourist when he visited Italy in 1773–75, Wright was a mature painter seeking wider exposure, not only to the figural arts of the past but to a different landscape scenery. He was in Naples in October and November 1774. Most of his important paintings with Italian subjects date after his return to England.
The narrative necessary to an understanding of this picture is as follows. The Roman poet Virgil, author of the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid, died on September 21, 19 B.C. at Brindisi and his remains were returned to Naples for burial in accordance with his wishes. A century later, Silius Italicus, consul of Nero, bought the land upon which Virgil’s tomb stood and every year thereafter declaimed the great poet’s verses in the tomb on the anniversary of his death. Biographies written in antiquity state that Virgil was buried beside via Puteolana about two Roman miles outside Naples, and that he wrote an epitaph, which was later translated by the poet Dryden: "I sing Flocks, Tillage, Heroes; Mantua gave / Me life; Brundisium death; Naples a grave."
An ancient grotto, or tunnel, at Posillipo lies the appropriate distance to the west of Naples and for some seven hundred meters forms part of via Puteolana. In the thirteenth century Petrarch and Bocaccio were among the tourists who visited the tunnel, which because of its location was associated with the great poet and known as the Grotta Virgiliana. Above the entrance on the Naples side stands a small domed Roman columbarium containing interior niches for ashes. The identification of this columbarium with the tomb gained currency by the fourteenth century and at the end of the eighteenth, it was still an essential stop for English visitors in Naples on the Grand Tour.
An iconography of the tomb had developed by the eighteenth century and Wright’s composition may reflect that of a print by Paolo Antonio Paoli published in 1768 in Antichità di Pozzuoli. Grand Tourists loved subjects of the kind. Perhaps Wright sent Virgil’s Tomb by Moonlight to the Royal Academy in 1779 in hope of future commissions and these were evidently forthcoming. Another canvas showing the tomb by moonlight and dating to 1784 belongs to the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, while a fine daylight view from 1785 is in the Ulster Museum, Belfast. There may have been six versions in all. Here Wright meditates on the passage of time, survivals from antiquity, moods of nature, and mortality. The canvas is a brilliant exploration of the contrast between the warm glow of the lantern in an enclosed space and the silvery moonlight trickling delicately over the monument and the landscape.
Katharine Baetjer 2013
Copyright Image
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