Landscape with Dido and Aeneas
Third quarter of the XVII century. Oil on canvas.Not on display
This is a superb example of the type of landscape that Agüero and Mazo painted for the Court: paintings already marked by their knowledge of the works of Claude Lorraine and, especially here, Salvatore Rosa. The event depicted is drawn directly from the Aeneid and narrates the moment in a hunting expedition when Juno provokes a storm that obliges Dido and Aeneas to take shelter in a cave (IV, verses 160-166).
Here, as in his Landscape with Leto and the Peasants Transformed into Frogs (P000897), Agüero bases his composition on models by other artists. The group of figures with the queen dismounting a horse whose powerful hindquarters face the viewer comes directly from a now-lost composition by Rubens known through Mazo´s copy (Díaz Padrón, Catalog, 1975, p. 334). As R. López Torrijos pointed out, while Agüero has considerably simplified it, and has removed the cherubs that accompanied the original, Rubens´s model is still perfectly recognizable. Moreover, Agüero´s dog is almost literally the one Velázquez painted in his portrait of the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Austria in Hunting Garb (P001186). The horse, while less exact, noticeably echos the one in Velázquez´s Surrender of Breda (P001172).
This canvas is an excellent example of Agüero´s mastery, completely immersed in a palatial atmosphere steeped in Velázquez, Venice, and Rubens´s lyricism.