The Building of the Trojan Horse

The horse is a weapon made to look like a gift

Men hammer, climb and paint around a gigantic horse. Its pale hindquarters catch the light while the head remains in shadow. Scaffolding and ladders make the animal into a building site, but its flowing mane and forceful pose give it an unsettling appearance of life.

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo’s The Building of the Trojan Horse in London’s National Gallery is a small oil painting catalogued around 1760. It is probably a preparatory design for the much larger version made around 1773–1774, now at the Wadsworth Atheneum.

The distinction matters. The London canvas is not the later monumental painting, and its artist is Domenico, the son of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. A familiar family name has helped several related works acquire confused dates and attributions online.

A painted horse contains a painter at work

A workman sits on the scaffold beside the horse’s rump. He raises a brush towards the pale surface. The gesture is unexpectedly close to the activity through which Tiepolo made the picture we are looking at.

The horse’s body becomes a surface to finish. Its appearance is part of the deception, so painting is not an incidental decoration added after the practical work. It helps turn a constructed object into something the Trojans might accept.

This small figure gives the painting a particularly sharp idea: an illusion is being manufactured inside another illusion. We recognise the workman’s task because Tiepolo has made his brush and reaching hand just specific enough to be understood.

The men around the head make construction feel urgent

Above and beside the horse’s head, men lift tools. Their arms make a series of angled lines against the open sky. Some work from precarious positions high above the ground.

Their activity prevents the horse from becoming a static emblem. The structure is still being altered, struck and finished. The people’s scale also gives us a measure for the huge object around which they labour.

These are not archaeologically exact records of ancient shipwrights or carpenters. They belong to an eighteenth-century artist’s imaginative account of a myth. Their poses communicate effort more clearly than a catalogue of historically correct equipment would.

Two standing figures watch from the side

The two men at the left occupy a different position from the workmen. One extends an arm towards the horse; the other stands close beside him. Their comparatively settled poses make them look like observers or directors of the operation.

The National Gallery offers possible identities including Odysseus, Agamemnon or Epeius, the builder of the horse. It does not securely name each figure. A caption that assigns them without qualification would turn a suggestion into a fact.

What is clear is their place in the arrangement. They give the left foreground a relatively quiet grouping against which the crowded, elevated labour at the right appears more intense. The pointing arm joins those two kinds of activity.

Timber keeps the living illusion from taking over

Below the horse, beams cross, ladders lean and rough material gathers on the ground. The supports expose the practical work behind its convincing silhouette.

The horse seems alive when we follow its mane, head and muscular turn. It becomes an object again when we notice the men and scaffold. Tiepolo allows those two perceptions to alternate.

That instability is appropriate to the story. The object must be convincing enough to enter a city, yet it contains something its receivers fail to understand. Its surface and purpose do not agree.

The disaster comes after this busy scene

In the best-known account in Book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid, Greek soldiers hide within a wooden horse. The Trojans bring it inside their walls, and the concealed force emerges after dark. The apparent offering becomes an instrument of destruction.

The fall of Troy is not narrated in the surviving action of Homer’s Iliad, which ends before the horse episode. Describing the painting simply as an illustration of a scene within the Iliad would misplace its literary source.

Domenico also painted the horse’s procession into Troy. The London works use swift, thinly handled paint, with small adjustments showing an artist developing his design. Their scale and technique are part of their identity as sketches, not evidence that the pictures have been left carelessly unfinished.

Explore the wider sequence in our guide to the Trojan Horse and the fall of Troy in paintings. This image holds us at the stage when a catastrophe is still being built by hand.

Questions about The Building of the Trojan Horse

Who painted it?

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, not his father Giovanni Battista.

Is the London painting from 1773?

The National Gallery dates its small canvas around 1760. A later monumental version was made around 1773–1774.

Where is this version?

National Gallery, London, inventory NG3318. It measures 38.8 × 66.7 centimetres, oil on canvas.

Who is the man painting the horse?

An unnamed workman shown finishing its surface. He is not securely identified as a historical or mythological individual.

Sources and image credit

• National Gallery: Building of the Trojan Horse, NG3318, current dating and version distinction
• Berlin State Museums: Degle’s portrait of Domenico, III.436
• Virgil, Aeneid Book 2, Tufts Perseus text

Faithful public-domain reproduction of The Building of the Trojan Horse, via Wikimedia Commons. Detail images are crops of the same historical painting; no reconstruction or upscaling.