Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

The Metropolitan Museum of Art


    • The Dream of Aeneas, ca. 1663–64
    Salvator Rosa (Italian, Neapolitan, 1615–1673)
    Etching with drypoint

    sheet 13 3/4 x 9 1/16 in. (34.9 x 23 cm)
    Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1917 (17.50.17.85)

    The Metropolitan Museum's painted version of Rosa's Dream of Aeneas (65.118) may have preceded this etching; however, Rosa altered nearly every detail of pose and setting. The artist drew his inspiration from Virgil's Aeneid (8.26–65), in which the weary hero, having finally reached Italy and about to enter into war with Turnus, falls asleep on the bank of the Tiber. The god of the stream appears to him, offering advice and foretelling his future as the founder of the Roman race.

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    This work has been published in the Museum's Bulletin or Journal. These articles may or may not represent the most current scholarship.
  • Christiansen, Keith. "Going for Baroque: Bringing 17th-Century Masters to the Met." The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 62, no. 3 (Winter, 2005).
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  • The Dream of Aeneas, ca. 1663–64
    Salvator Rosa (Italian, Neapolitan, 1615–1673)
    Etching with drypoint

    sheet 13 3/4 x 9 1/16 in. (34.9 x 23 cm)
    Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1917 (17.50.17.85)