Date : between 1742 and 1745
Material : Oil on canvas
Acquisition : Bequest of James Deering (1925)
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European Painting
Painting (Th?me mythologique)
Area related
Italy
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Tiepolo's Tasso Cycle
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1699 - 1770) was the most important and imaginative Venetian painter of the eighteenth century. Among Tiepolo's most lyrical works is this series of four paintings illustrating Torquato Tasso's (1544 - 1595) celebrated poem "Jerusalem delivered (Gerusalemme liberata)", first published in 1581.
In these paintings Tiepolo attempted to create a style that is a visual equivalent of Tasso's exalted poetry. In a fanciful account of the first crusade of 1099 and the subsequent capture of Jerusalem, Tasso described the Christian knight Rinaldo and the enchanting sorceress Armida. In his depiction of Rinaldo's struggle to overcome the charms of Armida and fulfill his mission to save the Holy Land, Tiepolo emphasized the conflict between love and duty.
Rinaldo Enchanted by Armida
A recently discovered inventory suggests that the Rinaldo and Armida series was originally displayed in a Venetian palace owned by the eminent Cornaro (Corner) family. Apparently, these four pictures, together with at least three oval paintings (now in the Galleria nazionale d'Arte Antica in Rome and the Norton Simon Art Foundation in Pasadena) and perhaps four narrow, vertical canvases (now in the National Gallery in London) once adorned a chamber in the Cornaro palace known as the "gabinetto degli specchi", or "the small room of mirrors". This location would partly account for the prominence of mirrors and mirrored surfaces in Tiepolo's paintings.
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's Rinaldo Enchanted by Armidais part of a suite of paintings in the Art Institute illustrating passages from a 16th-century epic about the First Crusade. Rinaldo is diverted by the beautiful sorceress Armida from the crusade to take control of Jerusalem from the Muslims.
Armida appears here on a billowing cloud, her shawl and drapery wafting behind her as if a gentle wind had blown this mirage to the sleeping crusader.
In this, the first painting in the series, the sorceress Armida encounters the sleeping Rinaldo, struck by his beauty, she decides to abduct him :
"But when she looked on his face awhile,
And saw how sweet he breath'd, how still he lay,
How his fair eyes though closed seemed to smile,
at first she stay'd, astound with great dismay;
Then sat her down (so love can art beguile).
(Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, XIX, 66)
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