Fate of Troy

Girolamo Troppa
Homer
ca. 1665-68
oil on canvas
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Jean-Baptiste Frédéric Desmarais
Paris with the Golden Apple of Discord
1788
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Jacopo Bertoia
Abduction of Helen
ca. 1566-68
oil on plaster, transferred to canvas
Galleria Nazionale di Parma

Luca Giordano
Abduction of Helen
ca. 1680-83
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen

Toussaint Gelton
Paris and Helen surprised by Menelaus
ca. 1670
oil on panel
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Bartolomeo Pinelli
Achilles swearing an Oath to avenge the dead Patroclus
1808
drawing
Yale University Art Gallery

Jacques Berger
Priam receiving the Greek Sinon
(announcing the gift of the Trojan Horse)
1782
oil on canvas
Galleria Nazionale di Parma

Pieter Matthias Goddyn
Priam receiving the Greek Sinon
(announcing the gift of the Trojan Horse)
1782
oil on canvas
Galleria Nazionale di Parma

Daniele da Volterra (Daniele Ricciarelli)
Aeneas with Ascanius fleeing Troy
ca. 1555-56
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Meissen Manufactory (Dresden)
Aeneas carrying Anchises out of Troy
ca. 1755-60
porcelain
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Bartolomeo Passarotti
Aeneas carrying Anchises out of Troy
ca. 1570
drawing
Princeton University Art Museum

Charles Errard
Aeneas carrying Anchises out of Troy
ca. 1645
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon

Johann Heinrich Schönfeld
Aeneas carrying Anchises out of Troy
ca. 1680
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

Ugo da Carpi after Raphael
Aeneas carrying Anchises out of Troy
1518
chiaroscuro woodcut
Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe,
Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence

Lorenzo Bartolini
 Death of Astyanax 
ca. 1841
drawing
(study for sculpture)
Morgan Library, New York

Jan Brueghel the Elder
The Burning of Troy
ca. 1597
oil on copper
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

from The Burning of Ilium

Look! on the high places of Ilium
I see burning firebrands
swung in men's hands.
Some new evil

is about to descend on Troy.

        Here this, you captains whose orders are to burn
        this town of Priam. In your hands

        hold back the fire no longer.

        Throw in the the torches. And having razed this city
        joyfully we'll go back home from Troy.

I go forth from my country, my city struck with flames.

Get up, old foot, and carry me along
that I may hail once more my stricken city.
Great Troy, whose very sound was once the breath of Asia,

your glorious name will soon be torn away.
You burn; already they are leading us as slaves
out of our land. O gods! But why do I call on the gods?

When I called on them before, they did not hear.

Ilium shines.
The fire burns in the chambers of Pergamus
and in the city and on the topmost parts of the walls.

And as smoke that fades on heaven's wing,

gashed by the spear, our country perishes.
Our roofbeams glow, wasted by blazing fire

and the devouring points of lances.

You, you that I bore, hear your mother's voice.

        Old woman, wail. It is the dead you call.

I set my old limbs on the ground

and loudly knock on the earth with both my hands.

I cry to the dead below,

unlucky husband.

Like a beast I am driven, like a chattel carried away

a slave under a strange roof out of my own land.

O husband, husband, lost, unburied, without a friend,

unconscious of my doom,

dark there in the dark,

for death has covered the eyes

of the holy that the unholy have slain.

– Ann Stanford, freely translated (1972) from The Trojan Women of Euripides (415 BC)