Ovid assures us that the Fates didn’t completely crush the hopes of Troy in its destruction: from within the burning ruins, the hero Aeneas is fleeing, his aged father on his shoulders, and with his son Ascanius. For a Roman reader, Aeneas needs no introduction; like so many classical heroes, he’s the product of a union between a god and a mortal. His case is unusual, as it wasn’t Jupiter to blame, and Aeneas’ father was the mortal Anchises, now being carried on the shoulders of his son, and his mother was the goddess Venus.

Venus and Anchises, painted by William Blake Richmond between 1889-90, shows this legend. Jupiter challenged Cupid to shoot an arrow at his mother, causing her to fall in love with Anchises when she met him herding his sheep on Mount Ida. Aeneas was the result of that union, and the legend is the explanation for Venus watching over the safety of Aeneas during his prolonged journey from Troy.

There have been many fine paintings of Aeneas fleeing the sacked city with his family.

Unusually, one of Adam Elsheimer’s paintings of Aeneas Saving Anchises from Burning Troy was made in gouache. Of all these depictions, this seems to be the only one based on a reconstruction with models, as the method of carrying is not only feasible, but practical. Note how Aeneas is grasping a robe acting as his father’s seat, and Anchises has interlocked his fingers on his son’s forehead.

That doesn’t, though, appear to have been a study for Elsheimer’s finished work The Burning of Troy (c 1600-01) painted in oil on copper. The pair, with young Ascanius and his mother to the right, are seen in the left foreground. Elsheimer’s backdrop of the burning city includes the Trojan Horse, to the left of the upper centre, and hints with subtlety at the vast tragedy taking place.

Simon Vouet’s Aeneas and his Father Fleeing Troy from about 1635 shows the family group in close-up. From the left are Creusa, Aeneas’ wife who dies before she can leave the city, Aeneas, Anchises, and a very young Ascanius. This is the start of their flight, as Aeneas and Creusa are persuading Anchises to let Aeneas carry him to safety.

Pompeo Batoni’s Aeneas Fleeing from Troy (1753) shows the family as they leave the burning city behind them. Creusa is already falling slightly behind, and looks particularly distressed.

Oddly, Ovid doesn’t mention Creusa’s fate in the Metamorphoses, although a Roman reader would have been well aware of the detail in Virgil’s Aeneid, where she is left behind. By the time the hero reaches the city gates with his father and son, his wife is nowhere to be seen. Aeneas re-enters the burning city to look for her, but her ghost tells him that his destiny is to reach Hesperia, where he will become a king and marry a princess.

Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius then sail with a fleet of Trojan survivors to reach Delos, site of a temple to Apollo, whose priest and ruler of the island is Anius. He shows them the temple and city, and the two trees that the goddess Latona had held onto when she gave birth to the twin deities Apollo and Diana.

Johann Wilhelm Baur’s engraving of Aeneus Meets Anius (c 1639), for an illustrated edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, might appear generic, but is actually carefully composed. Aeneas stands upright, his spear almost vertical, in its centre. To the right his father Anchises embraces his old friend Anius, and to the left is the young Ascanius. In the right background is the city, with its imposing temple at the edge.

This singular painting is Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with Aeneas at Delos from 1672. This was the first of half a dozen works that Claude painted in the final decade of his life, based primarily on Virgil’s account in the Aeneid. Its meticulous details are supported by a coastal landscape of great beauty.

The twin trees at its centre, an olive and palm according to myth, are those that Latona held when she gave birth to Apollo and Diana, and now provide shade for a shepherd and his flock of sheep.

The king and priest Anius is at the left of the group, wearing priestly white, and pointing out the twin trees to his guests. To his right is Anchises in blue, then Aeneas holding his spear, and his young son Ascanius, with a suitably shorter spear in his right hand.

Claude’s fine details tell further stories too.

The relief at the top of the temple, immediately below a couple of casual onlookers, tells the story of Latona’s twins killing the giant Tityus, who had tried to rape their mother. Tityus is seen at the right of the relief, fallen down and wounded by the arrows of Diana (centre) and Apollo (left). Similarly to the Titan Prometheus, Tityus was sentenced to spend his time in the Underworld with two vultures feeding on his liver, which regenerated each night.

Anius then entertains his guests to a feast in their honour. Anchises asks what happened to Anius’ four daughters and one son. Anius replies that he is now almost childless, with his son far away on the island of Andros, and his daughters taken from him by Agamemnon. Bacchus had given his girls the remarkable gift that whatever they touched was transformed into food, wine, and oil. Because of that, the Greeks departing from their conquest of Troy abducted them to feed their army. When the daughters begged Bacchus to release them, the god turned them into white doves of Venus, Aeneas’s mother.

Anius and his guests continue to tell tales before retiring to sleep for the night. In the morning Aeneas goes to the oracle of Phoebus, who cryptically tells him to seek his ancient mother, and head for ancestral shores. They then exchange gifts, including a decorated krater (wine bowl) telling another story. The image on the krater shows the death of Orion’s daughters in Thebes. Their funeral procession took the bodies to the great square, for their cremation on pyres. From their ashes rose twins known as the Coroni.

After that, Aeneas and his companions sail on to Crete.

You can’t get through life without seeing a hospital ward interior, and for most of us it’s now where we both start and end our lives. Over the centuries, hospital wards have changed from being mere dormitories to facilities for nursing and medical care of the sick. This article shows in paintings how and when those changes occurred.

Although medicine was still in its infancy at the end of the sixteenth century, it was then that hospital wards first became recognisable in modern terms.

Adam Elsheimer’s Saint Elizabeth of Hungary Bringing Food for the Inmates of a Hospital from about 1598 shows a ward run by a religious order or similar foundation. Above each bed is a religious painting, and watching over them all is a statue of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Christ. Saint Elizabeth works with her halo visible, feeding the man in the bed nearest the viewer.

With the Age of Enlightenment came the first major voluntary hospitals, funded by benefactors, charities, and public subscription. Johannes Beerblock’s painting shows the modern Wards of the Hospital of Saint John in the city of Bruges in 1778. Each bed was, in effect, its own private cubicle. There were trained medical staff, but nurses were still compassionate carers rather than professionals.

In the centre, middle distance, a group of four elegantly dressed physicians are doing the rounds of their patients. The main caring staff appear to be from a religious order, and wear its elaborate black-and-white uniforms. They are serving food, reading to comfort the sick and dying, and at the left are assisting a priest, perhaps in administering the last rites. Lay staff are cleaning and servicing the needs of patients.

One of the most important revolutions in healthcare was associated with the work of Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War. Although she is now a controversial figure, William Simpson’s illustration of One of the Wards in the Hospital at Scutari (Turkey) from 1856 gives an idea of the change that started in the middle of the nineteenth century. Towards the left is a large cabinet containing glass vessels of medication, and there’s a central stove to provide a little heat through the winter.

The hospital building shown in Luis Jiménez Aranda’s painting of Doctors’ Rounds in the Hospital Ward from 1889 isn’t modern by contemporary standards. A large and august team of physicians, no doubt with their trainees, is examining a patient’s chest during a ward round. The senior physician is bent down with his left ear applied to the back of the patient’s chest. Today, that act of auscultation would be performed using a stethoscope, almost a badge of office for medical practitioners around the world. The stethoscope was still relatively novel in 1889: simple monaural tubes were first used by Laënnec in 1816, but the modern binaural design didn’t evolve until the late 1800s, and an older physician may still have preferred to apply their ear directly to the patient, as shown.

Perhaps the first painting of what we’d recognise as a modern hospital, Jean Geoffroy’s Visiting Day at the Hospital from that same year, is all about light, cleanliness, and the clinical. Like other Naturalist paintings of the time, it also fitted in neatly with the Third Republic’s image of modernising, by applying the latest developments of science to the improvement of life, and illness.

Van Gogh’s Dormitory in the Hospital in Arles (1889) shows how, despite their improvement, mental hospitals were still a long way behind general hospitals of the day. In the foreground is a stove similar to that of Florence Nightingale’s ward in Scutari, and the carers are members of a religious order rather than specialist mental health nurses.

Anna Sahlstén’s Surgery in Hospital from about 1893 shows the dazzling whiteness of the modern hospital, with a smart professional nurse caring for a child patient in the background. On the wall is a large radiator for the hospital’s modern heating system, replacing the traditional stove at last. That’s perhaps just as well, given the winters in Finland, where this was painted.

In one of his loosest and most sketchy works, Nikolay Petrovich Bogdanov-Belsky dazzles with white and light in At the Hospital from about 1910. The nurse is taking a patient’s pulse. This ward’s windows are open wide to the countryside beyond, and there’s a large vase of flowers at the right, presumably for the healing effects of nature.

Indian Army Wounded in Hospital in the Dome, Brighton from 1919 is one of Douglas Fox Pitt’s few oil paintings, and shows the Brighton Pavilion in its role as a military hospital with two operating theatres and more than seven hundred beds, making it a unique ward interior. It was unusual for its time in supportingr a wide range of religious, ethnic and dietary needs. However, this painting was made three years after that hospital had closed, following which it had been reopened for the many amputees from the war, providing them with rehabilitation and training. That too closed in the summer of 1920.