Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia

In a golden, melancholy landscape the young Ascanius draws his bow at a tame stag, the shot that, in Virgil's Aeneid, will ignite war in Italy. Claude Lorrain painted this near the end of his long life, and the cool, elegiac light and the calm classical buildings give the fateful act a strange serenity, as if nature itself foreknows the coming grief. Now in Oxford's Ashmolean, it is among his last works - the consummate poet of idealized landscape closing his career with a quiet, luminous meditation on a small deed and its vast consequences.