Aeneas Receiving a New Set of Armour from Venus

Ferdinand Bol was the most commercially successful of Rembrandt’s pupils, and this monumental mythological canvas belongs to the grand public commissions that made his fortune. The subject, drawn from Virgil’s Aeneid, shows the Trojan hero receiving divinely forged armour from his mother Venus before the final battles of the epic. Painted between 1660 and 1663 for a burgomaster’s residence, the work marks Bol’s shift from Rembrandt’s intimate manner toward the more theatrical, classicizing style that Amsterdam’s ruling elite demanded in the decade after he left his master’s orbit.