c. 1820

Erminia Carves Tancred's Name on a Tree

Tommaso Minardi

Italian, 1787 - 1871

In Torquato Tasso’s poem Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) the pagan princess Erminia, searching for her wandering and faithless lover Tancred, hides in a forest dressed as a shepherdess. She carves Tancred’s name on a tree while weeping and says, according to the inscription on the drawing, “Oh, friendly trees, keep this doleful story within your shade.”

Tommaso Minardi was a professor of drawing at the Academy of Saint Luke in Rome from 1822 until 1858 and an influential theorist in the Purist movement, an approach characterized by efforts on the part of adherents to return to the formal values and subject matter of their early Renaissance predecessors. This drawing is particularly indebted to the work of the Umbrian painter Pietro Perugino, master of Raphael.