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Lot Essay
This canvas was recognised by Alastair Laing, and subsequently by Sylvan Laveissière, as a component of the celebrated series of pictures illustrating Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata commissioned for the galerie of the Hôtel de la Ferté-Senneterre, Paris. It illustrates Canto XIX: Erminia, attended by Vafrino, finds the wounded Tancred after his duel with Argantes.
Marshal de la Ferté-Senneterre constructed a hôtel in Paris that reflected his wealth and position and this was approaching completion when, on 6 May 1639, he wrote to the ambassador at Rome, François-Hannibal l'Estrées, marquis de Coeuvres about the pictures that the latter had commissioned for him. A list attached to the contract of 20 May 1639 establishes that sixteen large canvasses of specified scenes from Gerusalemme Liberata were ordered from a consortium of four painters, Giacinto Gimignani, François Perrier, Pierre Mignard and Charles Errard.
The present subject does not appear in the list and it has therefore been suggested, very plausibly, that it was one of the additional elements of the scheme ordered subsequently from Errard, as Guillet de Saint-Georges recorded in his life of the artist. Of the surviving components of the series, Mignard's Goffredo di Buglione [Godfrey de Bouillon] cured by the angel, Gimignani's Meeting of Rinaldo and Armida in the Enchanted Forest and Errard's Rinaldo abandoning Armida, all in the museum at Bouxwiller, and Perrier's Olindo and Sofronia at Rheims (all exhibited at Rome, 2000, nos. 22, 23, 25 and 24 respectively) are almost identical in height (22, 23 and 25 measure 236 cm., and 24 240 cm.).
As Verdi recognised, Errard's point de départ for the figure group was Poussin's Tancred and Erminia, now in the Barber Institute of Fine Art, Birmingham, which is generally dated to the late 1630s: the horse on the left suggests, as Coquery notes in the 2000 Rome exhibition catalogue, that Errard was also aware of Poussin's picture of the subject in the Hermitage, from which the wounded figure of Argantes in the middle distance on the right evidently derives. Errard's composition is calmer and less dramatic than either of Poussin's, as one would indeed expect of a work conceived as part of an essentially decorative scheme. His attention to detail is implied by the similarities between Tancred's armour and that of a bust in the Villa Medici that Errard himself had copied in a drawing (Paris, Bibliothèque de l'Institut, see Coquery in the catalogue of the Rome exhibition, p. 137, fig. 26a).
Alastair Laing (2000) suggests that one may infer from the stylistic distinctions between this and the Rinaldo abandoning Armida by the artist at Bouxwiller that the former was painted after Errard returned to Paris in about 1644. De Saint-Georges indeed implies that Errard's additions to the series were supplied after his return.
Marshal de la Ferté-Senneterre constructed a hôtel in Paris that reflected his wealth and position and this was approaching completion when, on 6 May 1639, he wrote to the ambassador at Rome, François-Hannibal l'Estrées, marquis de Coeuvres about the pictures that the latter had commissioned for him. A list attached to the contract of 20 May 1639 establishes that sixteen large canvasses of specified scenes from Gerusalemme Liberata were ordered from a consortium of four painters, Giacinto Gimignani, François Perrier, Pierre Mignard and Charles Errard.
The present subject does not appear in the list and it has therefore been suggested, very plausibly, that it was one of the additional elements of the scheme ordered subsequently from Errard, as Guillet de Saint-Georges recorded in his life of the artist. Of the surviving components of the series, Mignard's Goffredo di Buglione [Godfrey de Bouillon] cured by the angel, Gimignani's Meeting of Rinaldo and Armida in the Enchanted Forest and Errard's Rinaldo abandoning Armida, all in the museum at Bouxwiller, and Perrier's Olindo and Sofronia at Rheims (all exhibited at Rome, 2000, nos. 22, 23, 25 and 24 respectively) are almost identical in height (22, 23 and 25 measure 236 cm., and 24 240 cm.).
As Verdi recognised, Errard's point de départ for the figure group was Poussin's Tancred and Erminia, now in the Barber Institute of Fine Art, Birmingham, which is generally dated to the late 1630s: the horse on the left suggests, as Coquery notes in the 2000 Rome exhibition catalogue, that Errard was also aware of Poussin's picture of the subject in the Hermitage, from which the wounded figure of Argantes in the middle distance on the right evidently derives. Errard's composition is calmer and less dramatic than either of Poussin's, as one would indeed expect of a work conceived as part of an essentially decorative scheme. His attention to detail is implied by the similarities between Tancred's armour and that of a bust in the Villa Medici that Errard himself had copied in a drawing (Paris, Bibliothèque de l'Institut, see Coquery in the catalogue of the Rome exhibition, p. 137, fig. 26a).
Alastair Laing (2000) suggests that one may infer from the stylistic distinctions between this and the Rinaldo abandoning Armida by the artist at Bouxwiller that the former was painted after Errard returned to Paris in about 1644. De Saint-Georges indeed implies that Errard's additions to the series were supplied after his return.