The Death of Dido
Ferdinand Bol(Dordrecht 1616 – 1680 Amsterdam)ca. 1668–69
oil on canvas
169 x 167.5 cm Frame: 196 x 197 x 11.5 cm (773/16 x 77 9/16 x 4 1/2 in.)
FB-103© 2024 The Leiden Collection

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How to cite
Van Tuinen, Ilona. “The Death of Dido” (2017). In The Leiden Collection Catalogue, 3rd ed. Edited by Arthur K.
Wheelock Jr. and Lara Yeager-Crasselt. New York, 2020–23. https://www.theleidencollection.com/archive/ (archivedDecember 2023).
A PDF of every version of this entry is available in this Online Catalogue's Archive, and the Archive is managed by apermanent URL. New versions are added only when a substantive change to the narrative occurs.

With theatrical bravura, Ferdinand Bol depicted the climax of one of the most tragic

Comparative Figures[1]

love stories in classical literature, recounted in the fourth book of Virgil’s Aeneid.

Dido, the beautiful queen of Carthage, and Aeneas, the Trojan prince who had
survived the ravages of his besieged city, fell deeply in love after the shipwrecked
hero landed on Carthage’s shore.[2] Their love, however, was doomed from thebeginning, for Aeneas was destined to be the founder of Rome, and his fortunes layelsewhere. When the gods reminded the prince of his important duty, he had nochoice but to leave. Grief-stricken by Aeneas’s departure and mortified at having
broken her oath of faithfulness to her dead husband, Sychaeus, the ruined queen
burned all her lover’s possessions, climbed onto the pyre, pierced herself with
Aeneas’s sword, and died.
Bol poignantly rendered the last moments of Dido’s life against the backdrop of amonumental column, partially covered by a billowing, velvet curtain. On a sumptuous
carpet, the dying queen, supported by the old nurse Barce, makes one last effort tolook into the eyes of her younger sister Anna, who raises her right arm in despair as

Fig 1. Michel Dorigny, after Simon
Vouet, Death of Dido, 1643, etchingand engraving, 355 x 260 mm, BritishMuseum, London, inv. no.
1841,1211.39.66, © The Trustees ofthe British Museum.

she tries to hold Dido’s gaze. At the far right, Anna’s maid Melinda quietly holds a
handkerchief to her eyes in a moment of private grief. Dido’s lopsided crown, her
broken pearl necklace, and the way her dress has slipped down to reveal her rightbreast and the gaping hole of the mortal wound in her chest all convey a fallen woman
at her darkest hour. Aeneas’s sword lies glistening in the foreground, while smoke
rises from an urn alluding to the pyre on which Dido will be cremated. Aeneas’s
departing ship, seen in the far left distance, provides a painful reminder of the causeof this tragedy.

© 2024 The Leiden Collection

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Bol emphasized the interaction between the dying queen and her inconsolable sister
through their compositional prominence and their strongly highlighted jewels anddresses. Not only does Anna express the desperate sentiment of irretrievable loss as
she leans toward Dido, but her rosy complexion, red dress, and shimmering golden
mantle offer a poignant contrast to Dido’s deathly pale skin and ashen lips,
bloodstained silver dress, and white ermine robe. Barce and Melinda, on the otherhand, take on secondary roles. Barce’s face is almost entirely obscured in shadow
while Melinda is placed at the far right of the composition, physically separated fromthe central protagonists.
Although other scenes from the Aeneid were relatively common in Dutch painting,including in Bol’s own oeuvre, the subject of Dido’s death gained popularity only inthe second half of the seventeenth century.[3] Bol looked closely at the composition ofa 1643 engraving by Michel Dorigny (1617–65) after the painting Death of Dido bySimon Vouet (1590–1649) (fig 1), and modeled the setting after the French
prototype.[4] Bol also lifted a number of details from Dorigny’s print, such as Dido’spose, her dress revealing her proper right breast, the (mirrored) figure of Barce, thecreased carpet, the urn on the right, the column and curtain in the right background,and the fleet in the left background.
The striking eye contact between Dido and Anna in Bol’s dramatic interpretation ofthis scene, however, appears to have been derived from a later, nonpictorial source:
the 1668 play Didoos Doot (Dido’s Death), written by the Amsterdam playwright
Andries Pels (1631–81).[5] In Dorigny’s print, which followed Virgil’s Aeneid, there isno eye contact between Anna, who leans on her sister’s lap as she dries her tears withher dress, and Dido. In Pels’s dramatic reenactment of the classical drama, he deviatesfrom Virgil on precisely this aspect, writing explicitly that Anna cries out one final
request: “Oh Dido, Dido, look at your sister once more!”[6]By 1668, Bol belonged to the artistic elite of Amsterdam and would have known Pels,
a fellow proponent of the classicist style. It is thus likely that Bol saw Pels’s Didoos
Doot at the famous Amsterdam Schouwburg, which had reopened in 1665 after alarge-scale renovation, and based the interaction between the sisters in his painting on
the theatrical performance.[7] The painting style of Death of Dido is consistent with
Bol’s monumental treatment of classical history painting in the 1660s. He must haveexecuted this work shortly after Pels’s play was first performed, and certainly by
1669, the year in which he completed his last dated painting.[8]Like most stories from classical antiquity, the episode of Dido’s suicide had a didactic
and moralizing connotation in the Dutch Republic. In Pels’s dedication, addressed tothe burgomaster and the Amsterdam city council, he wrote that he intended his play
not only as an entertainment for the citizens but also as a tool for moral instruction.[9]© 2024 The Leiden Collection

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After all, as the inscription under the frontispiece admonishes, “unlawful andimpetuous love will always be punished.”[9] Dido was thus judged much more harshly
than was Lucretia, her virtuous counterpart whose rape and subsequent suicide had
also become popular subjects in theater and the visual arts in the 1660s.[10] Unlike
Lucretia, who died to preserve her honor, Dido tarnished her reputation the moment
she took up with Aeneas, dishonoring the memory of her deceased husband.
Given the large scale of the painting and Bol’s powerful foreshortening of Dido’s
body, it is likely that Death of Dido originally hung high on a wall in a grand room.
Bol’s monumental depiction of this tragic scene not only would have been prestigious
and aesthetically pleasing to its original patron, but also would have served as areminder to act rationally and morally at all times. After all, as Dido’s example
blatantly shows, rash and impassioned acts can lead to catastrophe.

- Ilona van Tuinen, 2017

© 2024 The Leiden Collection

The Death of Dido
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1. An expanded essay on this painting by the author, entitled “The Tragic Gaze: Ferdinand Bol, The Deathof Dido, and Late Seventeenth-Century Theatre,” can be found in Ferdinand Bol and Govert Flinck: NewResearch, ed. Stephanie S. Dickey (Zwolle, 2017), 98–113.
2. For an English translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, see, for instance, the one by Robert Fitzgerald (New York,1983). Book IV, “The Passion of the Queen,” appears on pages 95–121 (lines 1–705). The love story
between Dido and Aeneas makes up the entirety of the fourth book, ending with Dido’s tragic death inlines 645–705.
3. For an excellent overview of depictions of Dido’s death and other episodes from the Aeneid in Dutch
painting, see Eric Jan Sluijter, “Onderwerpen uit de Aeneis in de Noordnederlandse schilderkunst van dezeventiende en eerste helft achttiende eeuw,” Hermeneus: Tijdschrift voor antieke cultuur 54 (1982):
299–316. As for scenes from the Aeneid in Bol’s own oeuvre, in 1647, Bol painted the pendants Aeneas
Hunting, now at Ranger’s House in London, and Dido Hunting, currently in the Bergsten Collection in
Stockholm. See Albert Blankert, Ferdinand Bol (1616–1680): Rembrandt’s Pupil (Doornspijk, 1982),
99–100, nos. 22–23. In the early 1660s, Bol executed a monumental Aeneas Receiving a New Set ofArmor at the Recommendation of Venus in Vulcan’s Forge, more than twice the size of the present
painting, for the rich widow Jacoba Lampsins in Utrecht. Today, it hangs in the Peace Palace in The
Hague, on loan from the Rijksmuseum. See Margriet van Eikema Hommes, Art and Allegiance in theDutch Golden Age: The Ambitions of a Wealthy Widow in a Painted Chamber by Ferdinand Bol(Amsterdam, 2012).
4. The print by Michel Dorigny after Simon Vouet measures 355 x 260 mm and was executed in 1643.
Simon Vouet’s painting Death of Dido, 1642–43, oil on canvas, 215 x 117 cm, is in the Museé desBeaux-Arts in Dole, France, inv. no. MJ 87-520.
5. Andries Pels, Didoos Doot (Amsterdam, 1668). The play appears to have been popular: between 1668
and 1728, it was reprinted six times. See Ceneton, the Leiden University database of Dutch theater plays, edited by A.J.E. Harmsen. Gerard de Lairesse (1640–1711) designed a series of six etchings for thepublication of the play. Lairesse’s etching of the Death of Dido—which, unlike Bol’s painting, includes
all seven figures featured in the final scene of Pels’s play and depicts the moment when Dido’s soul istransferred to heaven—is the earliest dated depiction of this scene by a Dutch artist. Its composition
determined the pictorial tradition for the rest of the seventeenth century. For Lairesse’s six illustrations
for the play, see Alain Roy, Gérard de Lairesse, 1640–1711 (Paris, 1992), 430–32, nos. G 30–35. The
Death of Dido is G 34. For the paintings inspired by Lairesse’s example, see, for instance, Gerard Hoet,
Death of Dido, ca. 1680–1700, oil on canvas, 175 x 150 cm, wall decoration at Kasteel Slangenburg inDoetinchem, the Netherlands; Nicolaes Berchem, Death of Dido, 1678, oil on canvas, Liechtenstein
Collection, Vaduz.
6. Andries Pels, Didoos Doot (Amsterdam, 1668), 55: “Ach Dido! Dido! zie u zuster noch eens aan.”© 2024 The Leiden Collection

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Meanwhile, Barce aids Anna in bracing a swooning Dido. Melinda, who does not appear in the classicalnarrative, is saddened by Anna’s state and attempts to comfort her with reassuring words. In the Aeneid,Anna, the only person Virgil explicitly mentions as being at Dido’s deathbed, takes her sister onto her
lap and attempts to stop the bleeding with her dress. Virgil’s work had been accessible through the Dutch
translations of Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679). In 1642, Vondel published the translation of Ovid’s
Heroines, which included Dido’s lamenting letter to Aeneas. In 1646, he published the firstcomprehensive Dutch Virgil translation in prose, followed by a translation in verse in 1660. See J.F.M.
Sterck, ed., De werken van J. van den Vondel (Amsterdam, 1927–37), vol. 6.
7. On the renovation of the Amsterdam Schouwburg, see Rick Elenbaas, “De verbouwing van deAmsterdamse Schouwburg (1663–1665) in relatie tot het repertoire, het publiek en detoneelorganisatie,” De zeventiende eeuw 20 (2004): 285–98.
8. Compare the Death of Dido, for instance, to Bol’s similarly majestic composition of Aeneas withLatinus, ca. 1661–63, oil on canvas, 218 x 232 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. The Death of Dido
emerged from a private collection in 2007 and was sold at public auction at Nagel, Stuttgart, 21 March2007, no. 551, where Werner Sumowski first attributed the painting to Bol. Albert Blankert confirmed
this attribution in a note to Jack Kilgore in late 2007. The date ca. 1668–69 corresponds to Blankert’s
dating of the painting to the late 1660s. Sumowski dated the painting to the early 1660s on the basis ofstylistic similarities with Bol’s 1663 Allegory of Education at the Rijksmuseum, oil on canvas, 208 x 179
cm, inv. no. SK-A-46.
9. Andries Pels, Didoos Doot (Amsterdam, 1668), A5: “[m]ijn voornaamste oogwit [is] geweest ‘t vermaak
van uwe Burgeren, en ‘t nut van uwe Godshuizen [literally: churches].”
10. Andries Pels, Didoos Doot (Amsterdam, 1668), frontispiece, designed by Gerard de Lairesse: “Verbodeen Dartle Min ontvluchte nooit zyn Straf.”
11. For a depiction of Death of Lucretia by Frans van Mieris (1635–81) in The Leiden Collection, see theentry by Quentin Buvelot in this catalogue. For a depiction of Lucretia by Caspar Netscher (ca.
1639–1684) in The Leiden Collection, see the entry by Marjorie E. Wieseman in this catalogue. For anoverview of the complex interpretations surrounding Lucretia, see Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.,
“Rembrandt, Lucretia, 1664,” in Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century (Washington, 1995),
280–87. In the Dutch Republic, Lucretia was often regarded as a symbol of patriotism. After all, her
death led to the institution of the Roman Republic. The Dutch felt a close parallel between thefoundations of Rome and their own republic. Wheelock also discusses the tension between Lucretia’spreservation of honor and her breach of Christian morality in the act of suicide, a tension that isnoticeable in Rembrandt’s painting.

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Stumm-Halberg Collection, Neunkirchen, Saar, Germany, by 1903 (sale, Peretz, Saarbrücken, Germany,1987).
Private collection (sale, Nagel, Stuttgart, 21 March 2007, no. 551 [to Richard Herner and Jack Kilgore& Co., Inc.]).
[Richard Herner, London, and Jack Kilgore & Co., Inc., New York.]
From whom purchased by the present owner in 2007.

Exhibition History
Aarhus, ARoS, “Mythologies: The Beginning and End of Civilizations,” 14 April–18 October 2020 [lentby present owner].

References
Van Tuinen, Ilona. “The Tragic Gaze: Ferdinand Bol, The Death of Dido, and Late Seventeenth-Century
Theatre.” In Ferdinand Bol and Govert Flinck: New Research. Edited by Stephanie S. Dickey, 98–113.
Zwolle, 2017.
Høyersten, Erlend. Mythologies: The Beginning and End of Civilizations. Exh. cat. Aarhus, ARoS.
Aarhus, 2020, 199, ill.

© 2024 The Leiden Collection