The Dream of Aeneas

Aeneas lies asleep in a dark wilderness while the river god Tiberinus leans over him in a shaft of dream-light, promising that he will find his destined city. Salvator Rosa painted this dramatic scene in the 1660s, when he was famous across Italy for wild landscapes and philosophical subjects. The torchlight, the twisted trees and the heroic body of the sleeping warrior are pure Rosa — romantic, theatrical and full of foreboding, the visual language of a painter who preferred storms to calm.