Dosso Dossi. The frieze of Aeneas

Dosso Dossi, The Repair of the Trojan Ships, ca. 1518-1519, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Samuel H. Kress Collection, inv. 1939.1.250, inv. 2021.6.1

Dosso Dossi. The frieze of Aeneas  brings together for first time five of the ten canvases  that made up the frieze created by Dosso Dossi between 1518 and 1520 for the Alabaster Camerino  of Duke Alfonso I d'Este in Ferrara. The Frieze, of which only seven canvases  have been found to date , was inspired by episodes from the first, third, fifth and sixth books of Virgil's Aenied . These episodes combine stories of Bacchus and Venus (mother of Aeneas) with exaltation of the rulers who founded Rome.

On display are Journey to the Underworld  from book VI (private collection); The Cretan Plague  from book III and the Arrival of the Trojans on the Libyan coasts and  Sicilian games in memory of Anchises  from  book V (Louvre Abu Dhabi);  the Arrival of the Trojans at the Strophades Islands  and  the Attack of the Harpies from Book III (Prado Museum, Madrid);  and The Repair of the Trojan Ships and  The Founding of a City in Sicily,  originally a single canvas, from Book V (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC).   

These canvases are brilliant example of the artist's creativity, and of that sixteenth-century artistic environment in Ferrara that acquires new vitality in the great age of the Baroque. They arrived in the collection of  Scipione Borghese in 1608, remaining ed there until the end of the eighteenth century when they were is purchased by the painter and director of the Prado  Josè de Madrazo  (1781-1859) probably during his stay in Rome (1803-1819). 

For Scipio – who, in addition to also owning the painting  Aeneas fleeing from Troy  by  Federico Barocci , commissioned   his first sculptural group,  Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius from Gian Lorenzo Bernini in 1618  – the story of Aeneas as the founder of Rome and a new empire had a  profound meaning , linked to the existence of the pontificate and its relationship with the city. The frieze provides a portrait of Aeneas in his most positive sense : hero and incarnation of Roman piety and a figure who transformed the pain of exile into an enterprise that would rewrite his destiny and that of the world.