c. 1700

Armida Discovering the Sleeping Rinaldo

Italian, 1671 - 1749

Creti was one of the most polished and elegant painters of the Bolognese late Baroque, achieving considerable fame in his lifetime for his distinctive, rapid, calligraphic pen drawings. This example illustrates a scene from the late-sixteenth-century Italian poet Torquato Tasso's epic of the Crusades, Jerusalem Liberated, in which the sorceress Armida gazes upon the sleeping Christian knight Rinaldo.