Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo’s Trojan Horse Paintings
From the National Gallery, London
The Building of the Trojan Horse and The Procession of the Trojan Horse are part of a series illustrating the fall of Troy.
These scenes follow Virgil’s account fairly closely. Domenico’s first painting shows tradesmen sculpting and painting the wooden horse, and in the second image the horse is being wheeled into Troy by the unsuspecting Trojans. There is a third sketch in this series, now possibly in a private collection in Paris, which depicts the Greeks descending from the horse to attack the city.
Painted in around 1760, these scenes were probably intended as preparatory designs for larger oil paintings. Domenico’s monumental picture, The Procession of the Trojan Horse, which measures about two by four metres, is now in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, but the whereabouts of the other large canvasses, if they existed, is not known.
See these paintings on the National Gallery’s (not very user friendly) website HERE.