The suicide of Dido who reclines on a pyre in centre, surrounded by many figures
Medium
Etching
Dimensions
sheet: 13 x 18 3/16 in. (33 x 46.2 cm)
Classification
Prints
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1951
Accession Number
51.501.4254
Art Historical Context
This etching, created between 1650 and 1655 by Pietro Testa and Giovanni Cesare Testa, captures the tragic climax of Dido’s story from Virgil’s *Aeneid*. The queen of Carthage is shown reclining on her funeral pyre at the center of the composition, surrounded by a crowd of figures whose gestures convey shock, grief, and turmoil. Rendered in the medium of etching, the work demonstrates the artist’s ability to convey both intimate emotion and sweeping narrative within a compact sheet measuring roughly 13 by 18 inches. Etching was especially valued in seventeenth-century Italy for its capacity t...
About the Artist
Pietro Testa|Giovanni Cesare Testa · 1612–1650
Pietro Testa was born in Lucca in 1612 and, in accordance with the conventions of Italian artistic training, made his way to Rome while still young. There he studied under two of the leading painters of the early seventeenth century: Domenichino, from whom he absorbed a taste for classical restraint and narrative clarity, and Pietro da Cortona, whose more exuberant Baroque manner offered a contras...