Armida Encounters the Sleeping Rinaldo

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was the last great painter of the Venetian tradition, the artist who carried the decorative splendour of the seventeenth century into the age of the Rococo and became the most sought-after frescoist in Europe of his day, called to Würzburg and finally to Madrid. This canvas belongs to a group of four pictures on the story of Rinaldo and Armida that he painted about 1742–45, and it takes its subject from Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, the epic of the First Crusade that supplied the painters of the period with their richest store of romantic incident. The museum notes that the picture probably once hung in a Venetian palace and that its companions are now divided between collections. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.