Rinaldo and Armida

Torquato Tasso's poem of the First Crusade, Jerusalem Delivered, had been in print for about 20 years, and everyone in Italy knew its stories. Annibale Carracci painted this one around 1601, while he was in Rome at work on the great ceiling of the Palazzo Farnese. It comes from the sixteenth canto. The sorceress Armida has lured the crusader knight Rinaldo into her enchanted garden and, meaning only to trap him, has fallen for him herself. Carracci catches the pair leaning together over her mirror, the very glass she had used to snare him. Around them the garden she conjured keeps them both from the war outside. She holds the mirror up, and it is her own face as much as his that it shows.