The Departure of Hannibal (?),
oil on canvas, 81.5 x 114.5 cm, framed

The present painting, which shows stylistic and compositional affinities with the early 18th Century Flemish school, depicts a monumental turbaned figure directing elephants and horsemen across a ford.

Whilst the dress of the soldiers, with the distinctive long-tailed headgear of three of the attendants borrowed from Ottoman Janissaries - kidnapped in their youth and so attired in recognition that they lived ‘from the sultan’s sleeve’ - is based on roughly contemporaneous Turkish costume, the subject alludes to antiquity.

Around the time of the Siege of Vienna in 1683 the extensive woodcuts depicting the Sultan’s army by Melchior Lorichs, made in Antwerp in the 1570s, were used for newly published works, and it is possible that the dress of some of the figures in the present lot was so inspired by this.

The classicising influence of the academies of art established under royal patronage in Flanders and France in the 17th Century developed upon a long-standing tradition of using Ottoman tropes to depict ancient adversaries. In the present lot, the absence of an artillery train, the presence of elephants and a city matching literary descriptions of the grandeur of Carthage, may suggest the subject of The Departure of Hannibal. Recorded in Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita (Rome, 29-7BC), the life of Hannibal, was increasingly treated by painters from the late 17th Century onwards.