Tancred and Erminia

Tasso's poem about the First Crusade came out in 1581, and by Poussin's day it was the book everyone in Italy had read, quoted and set to music. Painters worked it the way they worked Ovid. This is the moment in canto 19 when Erminia, a Saracen princess who has loved Tancred from a distance, finds him lying wounded after his duel with the giant Argantes, and cuts off her own hair with his sword to bind the wounds. Poussin had settled in Rome in 1624, and he put the figures in antique armour and drapery rather than anything a crusader of 1099 would have worn. He had already painted this episode a few years earlier, in a wider, airier version now in St Petersburg. Here he pulls the group tight, so the squire propping up Tancred's shoulders, Erminia at his side and the horse behind them close into one knot.