“From its heights Troy is smashed to the ground” the poet Virgil claimed in the Aeneid’s second song which gives us an action-packed portrayal of the Greeks’ destruction of the city. The artist’s love of grandiose architecture is fully exploited in the painting, in which the ruins of Rome’s enormous bathhouses as well as its triumphal arches provide the background for the nocturnal catastrophe. The Trojan horse seems almost ludicrously small.