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View at the museum ↗Venus Healing Aeneas
Merry Joseph Blondelc. 1820
- Attribution
- Merry Joseph Blondel (French, 1781–1853)
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Physical dimensions
- 27 × 21.5 cm (10 5/8 × 8 1/2 in.); Framed: 39.4 × 33.7 × 7 cm (15 1/2 × 13 1/4 × 2 3/4 in.)
- Credit line
- Purchased with funds provided by Pamela and Roger Hull through the Old Masters Society
Museum metadata is available under CC0. Image availability and rights are separate; consult the source record.
Source rights statement: Public domain
View the museum record ↗From the museum
In this study for a larger painting of a scene from Virgil’s Aeneid , Merry Joseph Blondel depicted the epic poem’s protagonist, Aeneas, wounded and having dragged himself away from the battlefield. Hidden in a divine mist, the goddess Venus—Aeneas’s mother—and the river god Numicus come to his rescue. Numicus holds the hero as Venus administers a healing balm. The following lines from A. S. Kline’s translation of the poem describe the scene: This Venus brought, her face veiled in dark mist, this, with its hidden curative powers, she steeped in river water, poured into a glittering basin, and sprinkled there healing ambrosial juice and fragrant panacea.
Description: Art Institute of Chicago · CC BY 4.0