ruin. On the face of it this, in a scene from before the founding of Rome, is an anachronism that would have been apparent even in the 17th century, but it reflects the state to which ancient Roman monuments were reduced in Claude's own time. The painting therefore embraces the whole trajectory of Roman civilization across history, from its start to its end, and peoples an idealized landscape from Claude's time with figures from its early history. Subject and composition The subject is very rare in art, but there is a composition by Rubens, with a painting in Girona and an oil sketch in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, showing a different point in the story. This is also a late work, but the composition could hardly be more different; here Sylvia nurses the dying stag as a female companion keeps the hounds off it, and fighting has broken out behind them between the Latins and Ascanius' party. Claude may well have been aware of a depiction in the Vergilius Romanus, a 5th-century illustrated manuscript of the works of Virgil in the Vatican Library (Cod. Vat. lat. 3867, f 163 recto), which was a subject of interest to Roman cognoscenti. Stripped of the landscape the elements in the picture are similar, though Ascanius has already wounded the stag, and is pulling the bow for a second shot. A scene closer to the Rubens, with the wounded stag finding Silvia, is in the Vergilius Vaticanus of about 400; curiously, this is the point where the two Late antique Virgil cycles of illustration come closest to matching.<ref>Stansbury, Mark, Review of Wright, David H. The Roman Vergil and the Origins of Medieval Book Design. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002." in The Medieval Review, Indiana University, 2003, online text</ref> The composition evolved through a series of drawings, beginning in 1669, with two now at Chatsworth House (1671 or 1678) and the Ashmolean (1682). The final composition, with the river separating the archer and the stag, was only arrived at late in the process. As in the pendant in Hamburg, and many paintings by Claude, the composition draws the viewer's gaze into the background by having two large repoussoir elements at each side, where one is very close at hand, and the other set much further back. The diagonal from left to right thus set up is balanced by the river, which flows in