Armida Binding the Sleeping Rinaldo with Flowers

In 1581 the Italian poet Torquato Tasso published Jerusalem Delivered, an epic of the First Crusade that was read all over Europe and kept painters busy for two centuries. In one episode the sorceress Armida comes upon the crusader Rinaldo asleep and means to kill him. Then she looks at him, falls in love, and binds him instead, with garlands of flowers, so that she can carry him away. Willem van Mieris painted that moment in Leiden in 1709 and signed and dated it on the stone. From 1709 until 1748 the panel belonged to the Leiden collector Pieter de la Court van der Voort and his heirs. After a spell in The Hague it went to England, where it passed through a Yorkshire country house and a London collection, and it was with a London dealer when the Mauritshuis bought it in 1987.