Getty Museum

Rinaldo's Conquest of the Enchanted Forest

Creator

Italian Artist · 1605–1660

Francesco Maffei's fluid style combined the richness and splendor of the Baroque, the elegance and exaggeration of Mannerism, and his own flair for the visually dramatic. He probably trained in Vicenza with his father and with a local Mannerist painter. Active in Vicenza for most of his career, he also left intermittently to work in other Italian cities, including Venice, Rovido, and Brescia. Maff

More on Getty ULAN

Date: about 1650–1655
Medium: Oil on copper
Culture: Italian
Department: Paintings
Institution: Getty Museum

The medieval Christian knight Rinaldo has entered the enchanted forest, where monstrous apparitions have prevented his men from gathering wood to build their war-machines. Earlier, his companions had rescued him from the sorceress Armida's garden, and now they in turn require his assistance. Suddenly, hundreds of tree nymphs appear, surrounding Rinaldo, and the sorceress Armida appears from within a large myrtle tree, begging the knight to renew their love. His sword unsheathed, Rinaldo advances to strike the tree, thus overcoming the enchantment and enabling the Crusaders' liberation of Jerusalem to proceed. Combining themes of chivalric love with tales of Christian heroism, Torquato Tasso's 1581 epic poem *Gerusalemme liberata* (Jerusalem Delivered) celebrated the First Crusade of 1099 nearly five hundred years after it had taken place. Some seventy years after the famous book was written, the Baroque artist Francesco Maffei applied his energetic brushwork and rich color to enhance the drama of Tasso's Renaissance epic.

View at Getty Museum ↗

The authoritative record is held by Getty Museum. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.

Get printable QR codes

Open QR codes for this object page and the museum record. They stay collapsed until needed.

Open this page

See at Getty Museum

Related across collections

Semantically similar works from Getty Museum and other institutions.