The Wife of Hasdrubal and Her Children

Ercole de' Roberti's Wife of Hasdrubal and Her Children takes its subject from the Second Punic War: Hasdrubal, the Carthaginian commander, surrendered to Rome in 146 BC rather than die alongside his city, and his wife — unnamed in the historical sources — chose death over her husband's disgrace, leaping into the flames of Carthage with her children. The subject attracted painters drawn to Roman history's examples of virtue under extremity, and Ercole de' Roberti's treatment in tempera brings the intense Ferrarese expressivity of his training to bear on a moment of desperate resolve. The Cook Collection, which held the work, assembled one of the finest private collections of Italian primitives in England during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before its dispersal. Ercole's career at the Este court and later in Bologna positioned him as the primary heir to Tura's Ferrarese manner.

Ercole works in tempera with the aggressive formal intensity characteristic of the Ferrarese school — figures that push against their space, drapery with agitated folds, faces of concentrated emotional force. The narrative moment is chosen for maximum dramatic tension: the decision made, the action imminent.