hopelessly mesmerized by the eerie, indifferent serenity in Claude Lorrain’s last painting, “Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia” (1681-2), painted for his patron Prince Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna:
absolute stillness & calm on the brink of a war that has somehow already happened
absolute stillness & calm on the brink of a war that has somehow already happened
There’s something about the delicacy of the leaves in the bushes & trees which creates a static, frieze-like effect, & is reinforced by the break in the composition created by the stream & the way it opens up to a distant vista: there’s a sense of tasteful proportion & balance.
We have depth—ruined castles in the mid ground, travelers & their pack animals & finally sailboats in the deep background—but no real movement. We’re gazing on a passive scene in quiet contemplation: even the doomed stag stares calmly with us.
Yet this is the beginning of a terrible war that will consume the last half of the Aeneid. Juno has cursed the Trojans during their siege & her wrath followed Aeneas across the Mediterranean; now that they’re in Italy, approaching their destiny, she brings war one more time.
Juno summoned the Fury Alecto from hell to possess the hounds of Ascanius, Aeneas’ son, during his hunt, & sent them after a royal stag that belonged to Sylvia, the daughter of Tyrrhus, ranger & forester of the Rutulian royal house, esp. King Turnus:
“Here the hellish maid flings upon his hounds a sudden frenzy, & touches their nostrils with the well-known scent, so that in hot haste they course a stag. This was the first source of ill; this first kindled the rustic spirit to war.”
In the Lorrain painting, Ascanius is frozen, perpetually aiming his arrow; the deer is unwounded; it hasn’t yet crawled back to its stall, “bleeding & suppliant-like”, filling its mistress’ house with its cries.
War looms and perhaps we only see this in the dark clouds, which are only just gathering & do not dominate the sky.
The stag is untroubled, & Vergil tells us that this deer had been tamed by Sylvia who had “trained it to obey” & “with constant love adorned it”, twisting garlands in its horns, combing its pelt, bathing it in a clear stream.
It’s not afraid of people, used to their presence & protection; the deer almost offers itself up to Ascanius as if it’s a sacrificial victim.
Ascanius himself is weirdly elongated & lanky like most figures in Lorraine’s late paintings, but he’s also a teenager: he left Troy as a child clinging to his father Aeneas' legs, & is not an experienced warrior.
Ascanius does have one other notable arrow shot, though: he kills Turnus’ son-in-law with an arrow shot to the head, guided by Jupiter. Afterward, Apollo blesses him with a famous line: sic itur ad astra—“thus one goes to the stars.”
The deer shot that kicks off the war against the Rutuli is a foreshadow or presentiment of Ascanius’ divinely-aimed shot later in the war, the shot that brings a great blessing on him & his descendants: “son of gods & sire of gods to be…”
In Vergil’s Aeneid, time as experienced by mortals is an illusion: the future already exists; the past never leaves; the present is just the view into reality that’s available to us: prophecies are superimposed on the present, sacrifices resurrect the past & bind the future, etc.
In _The World as Will & Representation_, Schopenhauer gave us the most profound image of the illusion of time:
“We can compare time to an endlessly revolving sphere; the half that is always sinking would be the past, & the half that is always rising would be the future; but at the top, the indivisible point that touches the tangent would be the extensionless present.
Just as the tangent does not continue rolling with the sphere, neither does the present, the point of contact of the object whose form is time, roll on with the subject that has no form, since it does not belong to the knowable, but is the condition of all that is knowable.”
Just as in Vergil’s poem, Lorrain’s painting superimposes the future onto the present to show the illusion of time: Ascanius’ hunting party stands under ancient Roman ruins, the ruins of a city the Trojans have yet to found.
The columns, of course, are a playful reference to the patron Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna’s family crest:
But the ruins introduce a third element—in addition to the frozen, balanced landscape & the tiny figures poised at the edge of war—into Lorrain’s uncanny meditation on empire & destiny.
We don’t just have the vast, idealized landscape subsuming & overwhelming the tiny figures, itself a commentary on the vanity of human endeavor, but we also have, in the ruins, a reminder of causation, of the effects of human actions, even if they’re ultimately impermanent.
Can Ascanius see the ruins of the future city of Rome? Or is the viewer projecting—imagining Ascanius in a contemporary landscape? Is this the vision of a prince from an ancient aristocratic family like the Colonnas; is Rome’s deep past with Lorenzo when he hunts?
In the end this vision of Ascanius, forever aiming, about to release his bow at the stag that has been reared from birth for him, war on the precipice, the future of Rome already consummated & dissipated—
this painting unlocks the deepest awe in me, it wrenches me away from the quotidian world, it lets me see—no, it lets me feel the eternity behind me & before me in every breath, every heartbeat.
/fin
/fin
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