Giulio Licinio, The Attack on Cartagena

The Attack on Cartagena is one of a series of paintings by Licinio of scenes from ancient Roman history. They were made to decorate a room and were originally painted on wooden panels but have since been transferred to canvas. Their size and horizontal format suggests they were probably intended to be inserted into wall panelling, as was common practice in Renaissance Venice.

Three other pictures in the series are in the National Gallery’s collection: The Continence of Scipio, The Rape of the Sabines and The Intervention of the Sabine Women. A further two pictures from the same series are in a private collection: Coriolanus and Scipio rewarding the Soldiers.

The Battle of Cartagena was a Roman assault on the Carthaginian stronghold of New Carthage on the coast of north Africa in 209 BC, during the Second Punic War. The city was very difficult to attack as it was situated on a peninsula which was only connected to the mainlaind by a narrow strip of land. In Licinio’s painting we are given a strategic view of the countryside on the left and the coast on the right. It was here that the Roman general Scipio Africanus set up camp, cutting the city off from the land while the Roman fleet blockaded it from the sea. The Carthaginians attacked the Romans at the east gate of the city and got close to the Roman camp. Scipio had to use all the might of his forces to hold them off. Then an unexpected storm drained the lagoon into the Mediterranean, allowing the Roman soldiers to approach the city from the north while the naval forces penetrated it from the south.

Here, the viewer is thrust into the centre of the action. Roman soldiers lay siege to the eastern gatehouse of New Carthage as the infantry shelter behind their alternating pink and blue shields, and spears are fired into the city from a great machine of war. The earth tones of the soldiers' skin, the ground and the city walls are broken by a sequence of luminous colours in the costumes – pink, pale blue, lemon yellow, jade green and gold – that articulates the procession of soldiers marching across the panel. The kneeling soldier in pink is probably Scipio as he appears in similar costume in The Continence of Scipio. On the right of the painting some of the soldiers are wading into the lagoon. A plume of smoke rises from the blasted battlements as barefoot soldiers clamber onto one another’s shoulders to scale the city walls.

New Carthage fell to the Romans, forcing the Carthaginians to surrender their extensive territories along the eastern coast of Spain as well as their treasures and silver mines. The Continence of Scipio depicts another episode from the Second Punic War.