Exh. RA 1812
Oil on canvas

This is one of the most ambitious and important paintings of the early part of Turner’s career. It marks the first appearance, attached to the catalogue entry, of lines from Turner’s own fragmentary manuscript poem, ‘The Fallacies of Hope’.

Craft, treachery, and fraud – Salassian force,
Hung on the fainting rear! then Plunder seiz’d
The victor and the captive, – Saguntum’s spoil,
Alike, became their prey; still the chief advanc’d,
Look’d on the sun with hope; – low, broad, and wan;
While the fierce archer of the downwards year
Stains Italy’s blanch’d barrier with storms.
In vain each pass, ensanguin’d deep with dead,
Or rocky fragments, wide destruction roll’d.
Still on Campania’s fertile plains – he thought,
But the loud breeze sob’d, ‘Capua’s joys beware!’

These lines allowed Turner to expand the literary and historical scope of the picture, to which he added one of his most powerful visions of an awe-inspiring setting and the over-whelming power of the natural forces of wind and water. The result is an image that combines the emotional impact of the sublime landscape with the moral and intellectual concerns of history painting. By means of this linkage, Turner increasingly made history itself a source of the sublime.

The work is most probably based on Livy’s accounts of the battles of the Carthaginian Hannibal with local tribesmen during his crossing of the Alps to Italy in 218 bc, and Turner places the scene in the Val d’Aosta, which he himself had visited during his continental trip of 1802. Viewed from slightly above, the battle stretches across the painting into the distance (one of Hannibal’s legendary elephants can be seen on the horizon). By obscuring the repeated shapes of the soldiers and lances in the swirling mist of the towering storm, Turner suggests both a battle and a setting of vast proportions. Indeed, Burke had cited the uncertainty produced by obscurity as a prime source for the sublime.

While Turner thus creates an intensely vivid sense of immediate action, his text broadens the painting’s meaning, pointing to both past events and to future ones. By concluding the verse attachment with the words ‘Capua’s joy beware!’, he alludes to Livy’s account of the subsequent defeat of Hannibal’s forces in central Italy, after the bountiful lifestyle of the Italian plateau dissipated their moral and physical strength (see Gage 1987). Turner thus makes his painting in large part a moral lesson, warning against the enervating effects of luxury. In this way he achieves precisely the goal of history painting as described by civic humanist writers of the previous century, such as Lord Shaftesbury and Sir Joshua Reynolds, who sought to establish a school of painting that would help instruct Britain to avoid luxury and thus prevent the fall of its empire.

There is also specific reference to contemporary history in Hannibal, as Bonaparte had been depicted in the form of a modern Hannibal in Napoleon Crossing the St Bernard Pass (1800) by Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), which Turner had seen during his 1802 visit to Paris. Painted in the midst of war with France, just as Napoleon was advancing on Russia, Turner’s work very probably also referred to Napoleon’s recent incursion into the Tyrolean Alps (see Matteson 1980). Coupled with the warning in the verses, the storm in Hannibal may be seen in part as symbolising or foreshadowing the doomed ambitions of both Carthage and Napoleonic France, even as this swirling vortex of cloud, wind and snow was Turner’s most vividly naturalist representation of natural forces to date. This ability to depict natural scenery as subject to specific, carefully observed phenomena, while simultaneously the repository for moral and historical meanings, is one of the most remarkable aspects of Turner’s approach to landscape.

Turner’s own sense of Hannibal’s importance is clear from the diary of Joseph Farington (1747–1821), who recorded the painter’s concern over its placement during the Academy exhibition. Seeing that it had been hung quite high, Turner threatened to remove the picture entirely unless it was lowered. In its new position Hannibal attracted considerable attention; but some visitors complained that they were unable to see it properly because of the crowd gathered around it. Critics, moreover, seemed equally able to praise its lofty poetic and moral import, while recognising its bravura naturalism. The reviewer for The Examiner called it ‘a performance that ranks Turner in the highest rank of landscape painters, for it possesses a considerable portion of that main excellence of the sister Arts, Invention . . . In fine, the moral and physical elements are here in powerful unison blended by a most masterly hand, awakening emotions of awe and grandeur.’