Rinaldo and the Magus of Ascalon

Torquato Tasso finished his crusader epic, Jerusalem Delivered, while serving the Este dukes of Ferrara, and he wrote his patrons into the poem. In this episode an old sage from Ascalon meets the knight Rinaldo on the shore of Palestine, just after Rinaldo has left the sorceress Armida, and shows him a shield engraved with the deeds of his ancestors. Those ancestors are the Este family. Tiepolo painted the scene in Venice in the early 1740s, as the last of four canvases on Rinaldo's story, probably for a room in the Palazzo Corner at San Polo. For a Venetian patrician family the point was the knight's choice to go back to his duty. The old man points at the shield with a rod, and behind Rinaldo the boat that carried him from Armida's island waits at the water's edge. By 1912 all four canvases were with a Paris dealer, and the next year they went to Vizcaya, the Miami villa of the industrialist James Deering, whose bequest brought them to Chicago in 1925.