Description: The affinities between the author of The Trojans and his great compatriot have often been remarked. Ernest Newman described the Royal Hunt and Storm in the opera's fourth act as "like some noble landscape of Claude come to life in sound". Berlioz, who admired Claude, may conceivably have seen this painting, which was in Paris, in the Erard collection, in the 1830s. The composer's heroic, larger-than-life treatment of the characters of the Aeneid and his mixture of the monumental and the lyrical recall the painter's late Virgilian pictures. The two artists share a similar classical-romantic vision of a golden, mythical past, combined with a sense of tragic destiny, of the fatal moment of decision, and the numinous presence of the natural world.

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