Erminia and the Shepherds

The scene comes from canto seven of Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, the epic of the First Crusade, which Domenichino's generation read as a modern classic. Erminia, a Saracen princess secretly in love with the Christian knight Tancred, has fled the fighting in borrowed armour and wandered until she hears shepherds' pipes. An old man sits weaving baskets with three boys, who take fright at the armed stranger. He calms them and tells her why he lives this way. As a young man he had worked in the royal gardens at Memphis, and he left the court and its envy for this quiet. Erminia stays and takes up the shepherd's life herself for a time.

Domenichino painted it around 1622 to 1625 and gave the meeting only a corner of a broad valley, the helmeted girl and the startled family at the lower right, the flock on the left. By 1695 the picture belonged to Louis XIV and hung in the antechamber of his apartment at the Trianon, the smaller palace he had built in the park of Versailles to get away from the court.