Angelica and Medoro

In the 19th canto of Orlando Furioso, the Italian poet Ariosto's romance of Charlemagne's knights, the princess Angelica, pursued by many of the poem's heroes, falls in love instead with Medoro, a young Saracen soldier whose wounds she has tended. The two stay on among shepherds, and Medoro carves their names into the trees around them. That is the moment here, Angelica watching as her lover cuts into the bark. A few cantos later the knight Orlando finds those names, and the discovery drives him mad.

The Louvre dates the canvas to the last quarter of the 16th century and attributes it, with a qualifier, to Toussaint Dubreuil of the second School of Fontainebleau. It came to the museum in 1951 as a gift of Sir Bruce Ingram, the British collector and longtime editor of the Illustrated London News.