The legendary hero Aeneas carries his aged father Anchises out of the ruins of defeated and burning Troy. Federico Barocci (1526-1612) conceived and realized this scene in the 1590s when he was already past seventy. The picture now hangs in the Villa Borghese in Rome. Two drawings thought to be by Barocci (below) represent the same narrative, though there are conflicting opinions about whether the drawings were made before or after the painting.
Barocci's Saint Jerome (above) also hangs at the Villa Borghese (that immaculate treasure-house).
In the 1570s Barocci painted his patron (above) the Duke of Urbino, Federico Francesco Maria II della Rovere. This portrait, now in the Uffizi, is all grandeur and serenity, while the artist's self-portrait (below), painted some decades later, at the turn of the seventeenth century, seems to reveal the habitual anxiety and hypochondria reported by early biographers.
