The Life and Masterworks of J.M.W. Turner by Eric Shanes

Author:Eric Shanes [Shanes, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783107346
Publisher: Parkstone International

The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire – Rome being determined on the Overthrow of her Hated Rival, demanded from her such Terms as might either force her into War, or ruin her by Compliance: the Enervated Carthaginians, in their Anxiety for Peace, consented to give up even their Arms and their Children, 1817. Oil on canvas, 170 x 238.5 cm. Turner Bequest, Tate Britain, London, U.K.

Although this painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1817, it forms a pendant to the Dido building Carthage displayed there two years earlier. Its title was further lengthened in the Academy catalogue by lines from Turner’s “Fallacies of Hope":

At Hope’s delusive smile,

The chieftain’s safety and the mother’s pride,

Were to th'insidious conqu’ror’s grasp resign’d;

While o'er the western wave th'ensanguined sun,

In gathering haze a stormy signal spread,

And set portentous.

Here Turner depicted the moment between the second and third Punic wars when the Carthaginians, enfeebled by fifty years of peace, no longer had the will or military strength to stand up to the Romans; instead, they handed over 300 of their children as hostages. Grieving mothers aptly dot the scene. Luxury goods – including a garlanded painter’s mahlstick – litter the foreground and advance the associations of materialism, the cause of Carthaginian enervation.

As in Dido building Carthage, the underlying compositional structure matches the central dramatic point of the image. The earlier painting is underpinned by straight lines whose tautness projects the strength of Carthage. Here, however, feelings of muddle and slackness are respectively projected by the alignment of all the buildings in different directions, and by the flaccidity imparted to the entire image by the multitude of circles, semi-circles and ellipses formed by those structures.

In the distance the sun sets “portentous” on Carthaginian power. According to Ruskin, the sky was originally much redder than it is today, and thus introduced even more powerful and wholly appropriate associations of blood and death.

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