Dido, in a classicizing robe gathered in at her legs, stands within an extensive landscape; her body twisted to her left, left hand held downward and outstretched, right raised and holding a long dagger that she is about to plunge into her breast. She appears to cry out in her grief. She stands on a sort of hillock, within an extensive landscape; immediately behind to her right is a bare tree trunk, with some leaves at top, and to her left a large burning pyre. By the base of tree trunk is a broken tablet incised “AR.” In the background at left is a wood with a building with domed tower, and to the right a town, presumably representing Carthage, and a stretch of water, indicating the Mediterranean Sea. The scalloped modeling of the foreground uses the identical technique to that seen in the plaquette of Vulcan Forging the Wings of Cupid in the Straus Collection (cat. 47; 44.596). The edges are beveled at the bottom and sides, indicating that the relief would have been made to be framed. The reverse is relatively smooth, with some rough chasing toward the top.

Dido is one of the great heroines of the classical world, the legendary founder and queen of the city of Carthage in North Africa and one of the canon of Illustrious Women, who became such popular subjects in Renaissance art. Born in Tyre, Dido was married as a young girl to her wealthy uncle Acerbas, who was murdered by Dido’s brother Pygmalion. The widowed Dido then escaped from Tyre with her husband’s followers and came to North Africa, where they founded the city of Carthage. Dido subsequently had to contend with the attentions of the neighbouring king Hiarbas, who demanded her hand in marriage, although she had sworn eternal fidelity to Acerbas. Pretending to yield and under pretence of worshipping the shades of Acerbas, she built a funeral pyre, on which she stabbed herself in the presence of her people.

The Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BC) took this version of Dido’s legend for his Aeneid, his great epic poem recounting the journeys of the Trojan Aeneas and his followers as they flee the destruction of Troy, eventually after many adventures arriving in Latium in Italy, where they settled, to become the legendary ancestors of the Roman people. Virgil, however, subtly transformed the legend to create from it one of the most moving episodes in the poem, the doomed love affair between the Trojan hero and the queen of Carthage, the subject of Book Four of the Aeneid. The Trojans having been wrecked and cast up upon the shores of Carthage, the goddess Venus caused an unquenchable passion for the Trojan leader Aeneas to spring in the heart of Dido, destined from the start to end in tragedy, since Jupiter had ordained that Aeneas would depart Carthage to continue his journey to Rome. In its denouement (Aeneid 4.642–705), Dido stabs herself and throws herself upon the burning pyre, as in her original legend.

The theme was popular in art in the Renaissance period, employed not only as an exemplum of heroic female constancy, but also for the theme of crossed love, as seen for example in a superb gilt-bronze hat badge in the Wallace Collection, which bears an inscription translatable as “Not to be separated by death.”¹

The plaquette is a fairly literal copy of an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi (1480–1534) (fig. 1), the figure after a design usually thought to be by Raphael, the landscape copied from a print by Lucas van Leyden.² The main differences are the position of the left hand, held outward in the print, and the background landscape at the right, which has been telescoped so that the town is much closer to Dido’s shoulder. The other crucial difference is the substitution of the Greek inscription on the piece of wood propped against the tree with the monogram “AR,” suggesting the signature of Andrea Riccio.

There are several variant versions of this design. The first, generally regarded as the prime version, is known from a rectangular example in the Museo Nazionale del Palazzo Venezia, Rome (fig. 2),³ and another circular one in the Museo Correr, Venice.⁴ In these the main elements of Marcantonio’s design, the figure of Dido, the tree, and the pyre, are reproduced, but they are placed against a plain background. The piece of wood against the tree is replaced by a pair of shields and a blank cartello is suspended from the top right. In the version in Venice, a living branch extends from the left side of the tree trunk, presumably simply to fill out what would otherwise have been a void. In addition to the Houston Dido, there are two more examples with the background landscape, in the Staatliche Museen Berlin⁵ and in the Scaglia collection.⁶ These vary from the Houston version in that Dido is shown stabbing herself with the dagger, the tree is lopped off at the top, with the small branch growing out of it at left, and the hair is more naturalistic. The Houston version is overall marginally closer to the print source.

The plaquette is one of two designs directly copied from contemporary engravings associated with Riccio, the other after an engraving of Judith with the Head of Holofernes by Girolamo Mocetto, in its turn based on a design by Andrea Mantegna.⁷

The attribution of the Dido to Andrea Riccio was first proposed by Émile Molinier,⁸ and has been accepted by most subsequent scholars, including Planiscig in his monograph on Riccio.⁹ Like the Venus Chastising Cupid (cat. 56; 44.595), however, it is one of a group of plaquettes, discussed by Bertrand Jestaz in an important article, that appear to be signed by the sculptor and yet are uncharacteristic of what we would normally understand to be Riccio’s style and which, in most cases, fall somewhat short of the level of quality to be expected from his autograph works. In the case of the Dido, the plaquette bears an “AR” monogram, which not only differs fundamentally from the other “Riccio” signatures cast into the reverses of plaquettes, but is found on no other works by the artist. As Jestaz pointed out, the somewhat mechanically conceived design of those versions of the plaquette featuring the figure in a landscape in fact bears little, if any, stylistic relationship to the works of Riccio.¹⁰ Jestaz was more positive about the first variant of the plaquette, known in the two versions in Rome and in Venice, which he considered closer in style to the work of the Lombardo family or to the Paduan sculptor Gian Maria Mosca, called Padovano (c. 1493/5–after March 1574), thought to be the maker of most of a series of small marble reliefs, depicting figures from classical mythology, set within stylized and rather abstract settings.¹¹ The figure of Dido, as seen in the Rome and Venice reliefs, is certainly close to a work such as Mosca’s Portia in the Galleria Giorgio Franchetti alla Ca d’Oro, Venice,¹² and in fact the figure of Dido reappears on the reverse designed by Mosca, who had moved to Poland in 1529, of a medal of Princess Izabella Jagiellonka, of 1532.¹³ The attribution of the Dido plaquette to Mosca has in more recent years become broadly accepted.¹⁴ However, Manfred Leithe-Jasper more recently drew a distinction between the prime versions of the design in Rome and Venice, the attribution of which to Mosca he accepted, and the second group signed “AR,” which he thought at best minor products of Riccio’s workshop.¹⁵ This distinction between the two groups, for which Francesco Rossi has also argued, seems correct. The plaquette in Rome is a fluid and well-developed model, whereas the plaquettes in the second group are more literal reprises of Raimondi’s print. We know nothing about how Riccio’s workshop was organized, but perhaps, like the Venus Chastising Cupid (a superior work), the Dido was part of some venture in which small reliefs designed by other members of the workshop, for example Andrea’s brothers Battista and Galvano, were issued bearing Riccio’s signature as a type of workshop mark. Carolyn Wilson accepted this when she attributed the work to an anonymous associate of Riccio.

Leo Planiscig was, however, in no doubt in 1934 as to the quality of the plaquette, one of several works that Percy Straus bought from the Hungarian art historian and museum curator Simon Meller, among them the little figure of Vulcan (cat. 57; 44.585), acquired from Meller in 1933. As with the Vulcan, Planiscig, who was on friendly terms with Meller, took an active part in the negotiations, reporting to Straus that Meller wanted 35,000 francs for this “small but quite outstanding bronze relief by Andrea Riccio,” a price that Planiscig did not think excessive, but that he nevertheless thought could be brought down.¹⁶ A series of further, almost daily letters recount the frantic negotiations, which resulted in Meller eventually accepting a price of 25,000 francs.¹⁷ In his first letter, Planiscig warmly recommended the plaquette to Straus: “You would have, to go along with the Antico in your collection, a relief from the same period by Riccio, works by two artists who are totally different in their nature and yet, through the spirit of the time, so closely related to one another.”¹⁸

The Houston Death of Dido came from the collection of the lawyer Thomas Whitcombe Greene, who owned one of the finest private collections of plaquettes in the years around 1900, when the collecting of these small reliefs reached the height of its popularity. Whitcombe Greene lent his entire collection to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, where the Keeper of Fine Art, Charles Bell, had made widely known his intention to write the major reference work on the subject, intended to replace Émile Molinier’s pioneering and important, but largely unillustrated, corpus of plaquettes published in 1886. Most of Whitcombe Greene’s plaquettes, many of which had previously been lent to an exhibition at the New Gallery in 1893, arrived in Oxford in 1899, where it was assumed, certainly by Bell, that they would remain in perpetuity. Bell had plaster casts of most of the collection made, and electrotypes of a few of the most important items, in preparation for their photography for his projected catalogue of the Ashmolean’s plaquettes, which came to nothing. Many of these casts survive, including the Houston Dido in both electrotype and plaster cast versions.¹⁹

Bell and Whitcombe Greene fell out spectacularly in 1915, leading to the precipitate removal of the collection from the Ashmolean and its dispatch to London, where Whitcombe Greene gave the plaquettes to the British Museum.²⁰ It was long assumed that the whole of Whitcombe Greene’s collection of plaquettes had been given, including the Death of Dido, published by Leo Planiscig in his 1927 monograph on Riccio as in the collection of the British Museum, leading to confusion as to its location over many years. However, Whitcombe Greene evidently had retained ownership of some of the rarest and most valuable of his plaquettes, which were subsequently auctioned following his death, along with the remainder of his collections. The confusion was only really resolved in 2001, with Carolyn Wilson’s publication of the plaquette and its provenance, in her article on the Straus Collection.

—Jeremy Warren