My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

And it was the same sun Turner let shine upon his picture of an ancient harbor, painted some hundred years before. Turner found his motif in Virgil’s epic Aeneid, more specifically in the story of Dido, who falls in love with Aeneas and takes her own life when he parts from her. However, it is not so much the drama of the events Turner is interested in as the place in which they unfold. His painting depicts the harbor at Carthage on the northern coast of Africa and appears markedly Romantic in both its exoticism and its rubble-strewn ruin lust, the many monumental, half-collapsed buildings that fill its canvas. At least this was what I thought the first time I saw it. On closer inspection though, I realized these were not ruins at all, but the opposite. The great chalk-white buildings of Antiquity were actually under construction, and what the painting shows is a city rising rather than falling. It’s a splendid painting.