Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index



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  • Title: The Wife of Hasdrubal and Her Children
  • Creator: Ercole de' Roberti
  • Description: The unnamed wife of Hasdrubal was ashamed of her husband’s surrender of Carthage to the Romans (146 B.C.), so she killed herself and her children by flinging them into the flames consuming the Temple of Eshmoun in order to avoid being displayed in the Roman triumph, which was a humiliation her cowardly husband accepted. In this picture, the wife of Hasdrubal is shown running over the burning fragments of destroyed architecture with the two children she is about to cast into the fire. The way the wife of Hasdrubal is depicted is unusual because pictorial norms demanded aristocratic women be shown as serene and unengaged in any strenuous physical activity. However, the wife of Hasdrubal has an aggressive posture as she drags forward the two nude boys actively resisting her control, and her mouth is open as if she were shouting. Margaret Franklin argues these features of the painting serve to “masculinize” (Gender in Debate, pg. 198) the wife of Hasdrubal and depict her “courage, loyalty, daring, and indifference to physical harm.” (Gender in Debate, pg. 202)
  • Source: Wikimedia Commons
  • Rights: Public domain
  • Subject (See Also): Wife of Hasdrubal Children Suicide Carthage Fire, Image of
  • Geographic Area: Italy
  • Century: 15
  • Date: 1490-1493
  • Related Work: Margaret Franklin in her article, A Woman's Place: Visualizing the Feminine Ideal in the Courts and Communes of Renaissance Italy, argues that portrait of the Wife of Hasdrubal and her children were part of a cycle of paintings called the donne illustri cycle. This cycle included three paintings: the Wife of Hasdrubal and her Children, Brutus and Portia, https://www.kimbellart.org/collection/search/view/484?text=ercole%20de%20roberti and Lucretia, Brutus, and Collatinus http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Francesco_del_Cossa_030.jpg
  • Current Location: Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art
  • Original Location: Ferrara (?)
  • Artistic Type (Category): Digital Images; Painting
  • Artistic Type (Material/Technique): Tempera on panel
  • Donor: Laywoman; Eleonora of Aragon, duchess of Ferrara
  • Height/Width/Length(cm): 47.3 cm/30.6 cm/
  • Inscription:
  • Related Resources: Boskovits, Miklós, and David Alan Brown, et al, Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth Century. The Systematic Catalogue of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2003, pgs. 607-612; Margaret Franklin, "A Woman's Place: Visualizing the Feminine Ideal in the Courts and Communtes of Renaissance Italy", Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance edited by Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees, Palgrave, New York, NY, 2002, pgs. 189-205