Aeneas has been rowed through the Straits of Messina, avoiding the rock pinnacle that Scylla had been transformed into. From there he heads north-west until he meets a fierce northerly storm that blows him and his crew south to the city of Carthage, on the Libyan coast. Ovid breezes through what takes Virgil almost a whole book in the Aeneid, in a brief summary of the affair between Aeneas and Dido, Queen of Carthage. This ends with him abandoning her to fall upon the sword he had given her, and her body to be consumed on her funeral pyre.

Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s Aeneas tells Dido the misfortunes of the City of Troy, painted in about 1815, is probably the standard work showing the beginnings of their romance. Unfortunately it doesn’t give any clues to its tragic outcome.

In about 1875, when Paul Cézanne was still experimenting with narrative genres, he first drew a compositional study, then painted Aeneas Meeting Dido at Carthage. The queen is at the left, surrounded by her court. The warrior figure of Aeneas stands to the right of centre, and to the right of him is the shrouded spectre of Aeneas’ wife, Creusa, who had been abandoned by Aeneas as the family fled the burning city of Troy.

Normally titled The Death of Dido, Tiepolo’s painting from 1757-70 shows an odd composite scene in which Aeneas, packed and ready to sail with his ship, watches on as Dido suffers the agony of their separation, lying on the bed of her funeral pyre. A portentous puff of black smoke has just risen to the left, although it’s surely far too early for anyone to think of setting the timbers alight.

Dido’s spectacular death is shown best in what is perhaps Henry Fuseli’s most conventional history painting, known simply as Dido (1781). Dido has just been abandoned by Aeneas, has mounted her funeral pyre, and is on the couch on which she and Aeneas made love. She then falls on the sword Aeneas had given her, and that rests, covered with her blood, beside her, its tip pointing up towards her right breast. Her sister Anna rushes in to embrace her during her dying moments, and Jupiter sends Iris (shown above, wielding a golden sickle) to release Dido’s spirit from her body. Already smoke seems to be rising up from the pyre, confirming visually to Aeneas that she has killed herself, as he sails away from Carthage.

After a close call with the Sirens, Aeneas reaches the land of the Cercopes, who had been transformed into apes by Jupiter because of their treachery. The ship continues to the north-west along the coast of Italy, passing Naples.

This has been shown only by those like Antonio Tempesta who engraved for illustrated editions of the Metamorphoses. Tempesta’s Jupiter Changing the Cercopians into Monkeys from around 1600 shows Jupiter at the right, accompanied as ever by his huge eagle, with the transformed monkeys.

Once past Naples, Aeneas and his crew land at Cumae to visit the Sibyl there in her cave. He needs her assistance to go to the underworld to speak to the ghost of his father Anchises. The Sibyl reassures Aeneas that he will achieve his goals, and to that end she takes him to Proserpine’s sacred glade. Finding a golden bough there, she tells Aeneas to break that from the tree. The two of them travel to the underworld bearing that golden bough, make contact with the ghost of Anchises, and return safely.

During their walk back, Aeneas thanks the Sibyl for her help and guidance, and offers to build a temple to her, assuming she is a goddess. The Sibyl points out that she is no goddess, and explains how she had once been offered immortality if she were to let the god Apollo take her virginity. When Apollo had invited her to wish for anything, she had pointed to a pile of sand, and asked to live as many years as there were grains, but forgot to wish for eternal youth to accompany that.

Apollo offered her eternal youth as well, but she declined and remained a virgin. After seven hundred years, with another three hundred still to go, she is well into old age, infirm, and steadily vanishing as her body wastes away until only her voice will remain. With that, the pair reach Cumae, and Aeneas sets sail.

This is depicted in one of Claude Lorrain’s most wonderful coastal landscapes, his Coast View with Apollo and the Cumaean Sibyl from about 1645-49. Although their figures are small, Apollo on the left is holding his lyre in his left arm, trying to persuade the seated Sibyl, to the right, to let him take her virginity. Around them are the ruins of classical buildings and a stand of tall trees, as the land drops away to an idealised view of the coast of Italy. In the small bay immediately below them are some ships, which may be a forward reference to Aeneas’ future visit, although that would have been seven centuries later according to the Sibyl’s account.

JMW Turner didn’t tackle the first part of this story until 1823, when he painted The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl. His view appears to have been loosely based on Claude’s, but is set at Baiae, in the Bay of Naples. Apollo is again on the left, with his lyre, but the dark-haired Sibyl has adopted an odd kneeling position. She is holding some sand in the palm of her right hand, asking Apollo to grant her as many years of life as there are grains.

When Claude was painting his coastal view, François Perrier was painting a more conventional figurative account of Aeneas and the Cumaean Sibyl (c 1646). Aeneas, stood to the left of the incense burner, appears to be offering to burn incense in honour of the Sibyl, who stands at the right in front of her cave, and is just about to tell him her life-story. Behind Aeneas is a queue of people, including a king, bearing gifts and waiting to consult with the Sibyl. At the top left corner is a temple, and in the clouds above it the god Apollo, I believe.

JMW Turner’s first version of this later scene is thought to have been his first mythological painting, in about 1798. This second version, Lake Avernus: Aeneas and the Cumaean Sybil, dates from 1814 or 1815, and is both an improvement on the original and in better condition. True to the spirit of Claude’s landscape, this too is a mythological landscape showing the beautiful setting of Lake Avernus, near Pozzuoli, to the west of the city of Naples. In the distance are Baiae and the cliffs of Cape Miseno. The Sibyl, who doesn’t show her years, holds aloft a golden sprig rather than a bough, and Aeneas stands with his back to the viewer, as if he too is enjoying the view.

Turner’s last account is The Golden Bough, exhibited in 1834. It shows well how much his style had changed, although it retains compositional features from his earlier paintings. The Sibyl stands on the left, radiant in white light, and holding aloft a more substantial golden branch, with the golden sickle used to cut that branch, in her right hand. Down towards Lake Avernus are the Fates, dancing around a white glow. A couple of female companions of the Sibyl rest under the tree, but Aeneas is nowhere to be seen, although he might be in the middle of the Fates, perhaps. In the right foreground is a snake, a symbol of the underworld.

As Ovid ended Book Eleven of his Metamorphoses with some unrelated myths, he returns to the story of the war against Troy in the opening of Book Twelve. King Priam, father of Aesacus and King of Troy, is then linked with his other son Paris, whose abduction of Helen triggered the Greeks to launch ‘a thousand ships’ to start their war against Troy.

The Greek fleet gathered at Aulis in Boeotia, where they made sacrifices to Jupiter in preparation for their departure. Just as the Greeks were preparing a sacrifice they saw an omen, when a snake slithered up a plane tree and seized a nest of nine birds. This was interpreted by Calchas as portending their success against Troy, but only after nine years of war. With that the snake was turned into stone.

Despite their sacrifice, the sea remained stormy and prevented the fleet from sailing. Some claimed this was because Neptune had helped build the walls of Troy (as Ovid had told earlier), but Calchas said that it would require the sacrifice of a virgin to satisfy Diana, whom Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces, had offended. Agamemnon had to set aside his love for his daughter Iphigenia, and in his role as king, give her as a sacrifice to propitiate Diana.

Ovid is meticulous in leaving open whether the princess was really killed, or a deer acted as her proxy, so accommodating the many variants of this story with their conflicting outcomes.

Among the earliest post-classical depictions is Domenichino’s fresco in Viterbo, Italy, of The Sacrifice of Iphigenia from about 1609. The princess kneels, her wrists bound together, as an axe is about to be swung at her neck. Onlookers at the left are distraught, as Agamemnon at the right watches impassively. But in the distance, Diana is leading a deer towards the altar, ready to make the substitution.

Charles de La Fosse’s The Sacrifice of Iphigenia (1680), now hanging in the Versailles palace, uses a powerful triangular composition to arrange the figures, with Diana at the top, telling Agamemnon to spare the young woman, to his evident surprise. His large sacrificial knife, dropped from Agamemnon’s right hand, rests by Iphigenia’s right foot. At the lower right, one of the Greek warriors, possibly Achilles, is still resigned to her sacrifice, but the warrior standing above is already smiling with relief.

Many other artists painted this story in the meantime, but the next outstanding work is Tiepolo’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia almost a century later, in 1770. Iphigenia sits, almost spotlit with her pale flesh, as the priest, perhaps Agamemnon, looks up to the heavens, with the knife held in his right hand. In a direct line with that hand comes Diana in her characteristic divine cloud, ready with the substitute deer. Below is a group of women, already holding the sacred bowl up to catch the sacrificial victim’s blood, and in the left distance are some of the thousand ships of the Greek fleet, waiting to sail.

My next choice is an unusual painting by Jacques-Louis David, who develops the story using other sources, and packs his figures close together to great effect, in The Anger of Achilles from 1819. Iphigenia had already been promised by her father as a bride to Achilles, and the announcement of her impending sacrifice throws Achilles into the first of his many rages.

Achilles, at the left, reaches for his sword in an uncomfortable manoeuvre with his right arm. A rather masculine and tearful woman just to the right of him is Queen Clytemnestra, Iphigenia’s mother, and her right hand rests on Iphigenia’s shoulder. Iphigenia is dressed as a bride, and looks wistful, staring into the distance, her face empty of outward emotion. At the right, Agamemnon appears emotionless, but indicates firmly to Achilles for him to restrain his emotions.

Over a century later, more modern artists continued to paint this story. Louis Billotey, who had won the Prix de Rome in 1907 but is now forgotten, painted his version of Iphigenia in 1935. Clytemnestra looks distant at the left as she leads her daughter towards the sacrificial altar beside her. Diana, marked only by her bow and hunting dog, stands at the right, as the deer runs past.

No matter how it ends, the myth of Iphigenia’s sacrifice is a glimpse back into a dark and distant past, at humans whose commitment to savage rituals overrode their humanity to one another.

With Diana’s wrath assuaged, the winds and sea abate, and the Greek fleet sets sail for Troy.