Norandino and Lucina Discovered by the Ogre

Around 1620 Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the pope's nephew, was filling Villa Mondragone, the vast country house at Frascati he had bought in 1613. For it he ordered this canvas from Giovanni Lanfranco, nearly four metres wide, in the years the painter was designing a vault in St Peter's. The story comes from Orlando Furioso, Ariosto's poem of knights and enchantments, and it borrows from Homer's Cyclops. Norandino, king of Damascus, and his wife Lucina are trapped in the cave of an ogre who keeps them with his flock. They try to slip out among the sheep, wrapped in fleeces. Lanfranco picks the moment the giant, checking his animals by touch, finds Lucina and pins her down, while Norandino turns back to look at her. The canvas stayed at Mondragone until the 1690s, then moved to the family palace in Rome.