Lake Avernus: Aeneas and the Cumaean Sibyl

J. M. W. Turner

Oil on canvas

Yale Center for British Art

This oil on canvas by Joseph Mallord William Turner depicts a scene from the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid, in which the Cumaean Sibyl — priestess and prophetess of Apollo — prepares to lead the Trojan hero Aeneas to the entrance of the underworld at Lake Avernus, a volcanic crater lake near Naples believed by the ancient Romans to be a gateway to the realm of the dead. Turner renders the luminous Italianate landscape in a manner deeply indebted to the classical ideal of Claude Lorrain, with sweeping trees, warm coloring, and a sense of infinite atmospheric recession. Painted before Turner had ever visited Italy, the work was commissioned by the antiquarian Sir Richard Colt Hoare, who supplied Turner with his own sketches of the Cumaean landscape. The composition exemplifies Turner's ambition to rival the Old Masters while engaging the Romantic fascination with classical myth, natural light, and the threshold between the mortal and underworld realms.