Erminia among the Shepherds

Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, an epic of the First Crusade first published in full in 1581, gave 17th-century painters one of their favourite quiet interludes, and this canvas takes it from the poem's seventh canto. Erminia is a Saracen princess secretly in love with the Christian knight Tancredi. To reach him she has put on the armour of the warrior maiden Clorinda, been chased off by Christian soldiers, and fled through the night. She wakes beside the river Jordan to the sound of singing and finds an old man weaving baskets beside his flock, with three boys singing nearby. At the sight of her armour they take fright, until she uncovers her face and her hair. The old man tells her that he once served at a royal court and left it for this life far from the war, and Erminia stays among the shepherds, dressed as one of them. The museum dates the canvas between 1633 and 1637, the years when Lanfranco left Rome to work in Naples.