Rinaldo and Armida

Tiarini Alessandro

(Bologna 1577 - 1668)

The work, long mistakenly identified as a painting bequeathed to Scipione Borghese by Cardinal Alessandro d’Este in 1624 (Lille, Musée des Beaux-Arts, inv. 27), was first referred to as being in Villa Pinciana by Iacomo Manilli in 1650. It focuses on one of the most famous love themes from Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) (1581). In the painting, the knight Rinaldo, seduced by the sorceress Armida, sleeps in the enchanted chariot that the woman is driving. Hanging on the right is the mirror by means of which Rinaldo will break the spell after seeing his reflected image.

Object details

Commentary

The provenance of the painting, mentioned by Iacomo Manilli in the Borghese Collection in 1650 as a work by Alessandro Tiarini, is still unknown. Malvasia (1678), in his biography of the Bologna painter, gives an accurate description of the painting, partly taken up by Manilli: ‘and in the Villa, also belonging to the Borghese, in the fourth room on the ground floor, [there is the painting with] a full-length Rinaldo sleeping and Armida handing her helmet to a woman, painted as is his custom with a variety of foreshortenings, very well preserved for the reason, already stated, of his technique whereby he applies [to the canvas], for the figures, first a base, then a body [with thick, pigment-rich impasto] and finally superimposes glazing’. Memory of this early attribution seems to have been subsequently lost, and in the 1790 inventory the work appears under the name of Pietro da Cortona. In the fideicommissary inventory of 1833 and in the catalogue by Piancastelli (1891) the painting is listed as being by an unknown artist from Bologna. Venturi (1893) is credited with reassigning the work to Tiarini, and Longhi (1928) considered it as dating from his early period. Della Pergola, contradicting Campori’s notes on Cardinal Alessandro d’Este’s inventory (1870, pp. 59, 70), identified it with the painting he bequeathed in 1624 to Scipione Borghese, a hypothesis later taken up by Lugli (1985), followed by Guarino (1992) and Negro and Roio (2000). In 1998, Loire (see also 2002) clarified the issue, arguing that the painting from Alessandro d’Este’s collection was the Rinaldo impedisce ad Armida di uccidersi (Rinaldo Prevents Armida from Killing Herself) held in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lille (inv. 27) and not the Borghese painting, a view shared by later critics, in particular Guelfi (2001) and recently Scanu (2023). As the latter has noted, in fact, the work does not appear in the oldest inventory of Cardinal Scipione’s collection, datable to the second half of the 1620s (Corradini 1998).

The subject is taken from Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), ‘a text which Tiarini had the opportunity to tackle on several occasions’ (Benati 2001, p. 202). As noted by Benati (ibid.), the close reading of the image offered by Lugli (1985), allows us to appreciate the numerous details inserted by the artist to visualise the episode narrated by Tasso: where Armida transports the sleeping Christian warrior to her enchanted palace, pulling him on a chariot (Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, Canto XIV, Octave 68). While Rinaldo slumbers in a deep magical sleep, already tied to the chariot with strings of flowers, the sorceress turns to a handmaiden who holds the young man’s helmet, which has an eagle with outstretched wings on top.

In terms of style, after Longhi judged it to be an early work, Lugli (1985) put forward a dating of around 1620, a view shared by Guarino (1992) and Negro and Roio (2000). Geulfi (2001), on the other hand, pointed out features such as the excessive refinement and use of striking chiaroscuro contrasts, pushing the date of execution forward to the mid-1620s. Scanu (2023) likened the painting to another work by Tiarini on a theme from Tasso in the BPER Collection (see Benati 1987, pp. 98-101, no. 23), which can be dated to within the middle of the third decade.

Elisa Martini