Aeneas Legend: Aeneas Performing Obsequies for His Father

Throughout the whole of the eighteenth century the Turinese court avidly acquired paintings by Italy’s best and most famous artists. It also encouraged budding local painters thereby supplying itself with potential artists to meet its demand for painted decoration. Claudio Francesco Beaumont’s apprenticeship in Rome in the 1710s and then in the 1720s was financed by royal stipends. Returning from Rome, in 1731 Carlo Emanuele III named him “primo pittore di gabinetto”, and for the next two decades he was responsible for all the painting in the Palazzo Reale.

Beaumont’s contribution to the painting of the Palazzo Reale includes, in addition to four living rooms, two galleries, of which the Galleria della Regina, later named after him, is one of the largest (60 m long) and the most magnificent of its kind. In 1833, it was separated from the palace complex, and has since served as the Armeria Reale, housing the Savoyard weapon collection.

The subject of the ceiling painting in the Galleria is the legend of Aeneas, the mortal son of Venus who escaped from the burning Troy with his father and his son, and after many trials and misadventures landed at last at the mouth of the Tiber. There he became through his son Ascanius the progenitor of the gens Julia.

The picture shows a rarely depicted episode of the Legend of Aeneas: Aeneas placing an offering on his father’s grave in Sicily, where the appearance of a snake proves a good omen.