Page 41 - Joseph Wright of Derby: Virgils's Tomb & The Grand Tour.

Fig.4. JOSEPH WRIGHT, Grotto in the Gulf of Salerno - Cavern Morning, Fig.5. JOSEPH WRIGHT, A Cavern Morning, 1774. Mr. & Mrs R.Kirk
1774, preparatory drawing. Private Collection.
Sybil also guided those who sought the entrance to
the underworld at the nearby crater of Avernus.
Here Aeneas descends to find his father Anchises, not
heeding her warning:
....Trojan,Anchises’ son,
The way downward is easy from Avernus.
Black Dis’s door stands open night and day.
But to retrace your steps to Heaven’s air,
There is the trouble, there the toil.6
Caves and fissures were the entry into a world of
subterranean force. Wright drew and painted many
caverns, always endowing them with some sense of
a mystery beyond the natural. Seen from within,
they are both a refuge and an exile from the brightly
lit world. The concentration on the lonely figure in
the cave, and the suggestion of the cavern as a holy
site, was a familiar setting, long used in the paint-
ings of St Jerome and other saints in the wilderness,
and adopted by artists like DavidTeniers theYounger
Askew Collection.
in the mid seventeenth century, in his Hermits in a
Cave and Mary Magdalene in Penitence (Fig. 3).7 Wright
follows Teniers in rendering the human protagonists
small, almost insignificant, in contrast to the gaping
caverns. On the coast near Naples he made detailed
studies in black chalk, paying careful attention to the
overhanging rocks and the angles of light reflected
upwards by the sea (Fig 4). Two of the works based
on these sketches, painted on his return to England, A
Cavern, Morning and A Cavern, Evening, show the cave
empty, emphasising the mysterious, luminous qual-
ity of the rocky interior (Fig. 5), but two others com-
bine this geological sublime with theatrical compositions
and historical reference. In Grotto by the Seaside in the
6. Virgil, Aeneid 6, ll 185-9.Trs. Robert Fitzgerald, Random House
NewYork, 1983.
7. David Teniers theYounger, Hermits in a Cave, Private Collection; St
Mary Magdalen in Penitence, 1634, Dulwich Picture Gallery.
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