Feminine Wiles and Masculine Weakness: Seventeenth-Century Visual Responses to Tasso’s Crusade

Abstract

This essay offers a political reading of the artistic choices made by seventeenth-century painters in their depictions of the heroines of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1581). It discusses the political subtext of Tasso’s epic poem by exploring the roles Tasso assigns to his oriental heroines and their representation in seventeenth-century paintings. Painters and patrons alike were particularly enthusiastic about the love stories that developed around Jerusalem. But Tasso is promoting a crusade, and the visual focus of later painters on Tasso’s seductive female protagonists and their submission to Christian warriors, suggests that their aim was to display the delights that await those who join a military expedition to conquer the Holy Land.

Notes

1. John Hoole, Preface to Gerusalemme Liberata, in Torquato Tasso, trans. and ed. John Hoole, 2 vols. (1763; London: J. Dodsley, 1792), 1.xii.

2. Torquato Tasso, La Gerusalemme Liberata di Torquato Tasso con la annotationi di Scipion Gentili, e di Giulio Guastavini (1581; Genoa: G. Pavoni, 1617). All English translations are from Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, trans. and ed. Ralph Nash (Detroit, IL: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 1.1; hereafter cited in the text.

3. Torquato Tasso, Il Minturno, or On Beauty, in Tasso’s Dialogues: A Selection, with the Discourse on the Art of the Dialogue, trans. Carnes Lord and Dain A. Trafton (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), 221.

4. See Melinda J. Gough, “Tasso’s Enchantress, Tasso’s Captive Woman,ˮ Renaissance Quarterly 54.2 (2001): 533.

5. On Tasso’s audience, see Tobias Gregory, “Tasso’s God: Divine Action in Gerusalemme Liberata,ˮ Renaissance Quarterly 55.2 (2002): 561–63. On seductive elements in theatrical performances of Tasso’s Armida, see Eric Nicholson, “Romance as Role Model: Early Female Performances of Orlando furioso and Gerusalemme liberate,ˮ in Renaissance Transactions: Ariosto and Tasso, ed. Valeria Finucci (Durham NC: Duke University Press,1999), 250–51.

6. Naomi Yavneh, “The Threat of Sensuality: Tasso’s Temptress and the Counter-Reformation” (PhD diss., University of California, 1991), 3.

7. Lord and Trafton, Tasso’s Dialogues, 85.

8. In this Tasso follows the traditional view of blaming Eve for the Fall by inducing Adam to eat of the forbidden fruit. It was her weakness that made Eve manipulate Adam. She seduced him into doing something that was against his will, against his interests, and against the law; thus she, and by implication womankind in general, proved herself unworthy of men’s trust. See Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Women: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 18. See also Paolo Berdini, “Women under the Gaze: A Renaissance Genealogy,ˮ Art History 21.4 (1998): 565–90. On the negative power of women and its dangers, see Page Dubois, History, Rhetorical Description and the Epic: From Homer to Spencer (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), 6. On women’s power to make men do things against their better judgment, see also Elizabeth Alice Honig, “Desire and Domestic Economy,ˮ Art Bulletin 83.2 (2001): 298.

9. On the popularity of Tasso’s epic poem, see also British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books, 58–64; Gabriel Rouchès, “L’interprétation du Roland furieux et de la Jérusalem délivrée dans les arts plastiques,” Études Italiennes 2 (1920): 193–212; Clovis Whitfield, “A Programme for Erminia and the Shepherd by G. B. Agucchi,ˮ Sroria dell’ arte 19 (1973): 217; Peter Skrine, The Baroque: Literature and Culture in Seventeenth-Century Europe (London: Methuen, 1978), 68–69.

10. Andrew Fichter, Poets Historical: Dynastic Epic in the Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 127.

11. Skrine, The Baroque, 67; Cecil Maurice Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (London: Macmillan, 1967), 139–54; Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 2.983–1072; David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 214–34; Julia M. Cozzarelli, “Torquato Tasso and the Furore of Love, War and Madness,ˮ Italica 84.2/3 (2007): 173 and 178.

12. André Chastel, “Gli artisti di Tasso,ˮ in Torquato Tasso tra letteratura musica teatro e arti figurative, ed. Andrea Buzzoni (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1985), 197; Julian Brooks, “Andrea Boscoli’s ʽLove of Gerusalemme Liberataʼ,ˮ Master Drawings 38.4 (2000): 456.

13. On the first interlude as an educational phase for Erminia, see Kristen Olson Murtaugh, “Erminia Delivered: Notes on Tasso and Romance,ˮ Quaderni D’Italianistica 3.1 (1982): 16. On Erminia’s spiritual turnabout, see Marilyn Migiel, “Tasso’s Erminia: Telling an Alternate Story,ˮ Italica 64.1 (1987): 68.

14. Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 48; Chastel, “Gli artisti di Tasso,ˮ 197–98. See also Elizabeth Siberry, “Tasso and the Crusades: History of a Legacy,” Journal of Medieval History 19 (1993): 167–68.

15. See Ellis K. Waterhouse, “Tasso and the Visual Arts,” Italian Studies 3.3/4 (1947): 160. See also Rensselaer W. Lee, “Armida’s Abandonment: A Study in Tasso Iconography before 1700,ˮ in De Artibus Opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, ed. Millard Meiss, 2 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 339; Chastel, “Gli artisti di Tasso,ˮ 196; Emmanuelle Hénin and Olivier Bonfait, “Peindre La Jérusalem délivrée au XVIIe siècle: Poésie épique et représentation tragique,ˮ in Autour de Poussin: Idéal classique et épopée baroque entre Paris et Rome, ed. Olivier Bonfait and Jean-Claude Boyer (Rome: Académie de France À Rome and Edizioni De Luca, 2000), 29; Brooks, “Andrea Boscoli’s ʽLove of Gerusalemme Liberata’,” 455–56.

16. See Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 44–45.

17. On Ludovico’s painting, see Massimo Ferretti, “Ludovico Carracci: Rinaldo ed Armida,ˮ in Torquato Tasso tra letteratura musica teatro e arti figurative, ed. Andrea Buzzoni (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1985), 249–54; Gail Feigenbaum’s entry on the painting in Ludovico Carracci, ed. Andrea Emiliani, exh. cat. (Bologna: Nuova Alfa; and Forth Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, 1993), 85–86. On Annibale’s painting, see Donald Posner, Annibale Carracci: A Study in the Reform of Italian Painting around 1590, 2 vols. (London: Phaidon, 1971), 2.58, and Ferretti’s entry on the painting in Buzzoni, Torquato Tasso tra letteratura musica teatro e arti figurative, 255–59.

18. Eleven illustrations were engraved by the Venetian Giacomo Franco, and ten by the Bolognese Agostino Carracci. See Emilio Faccioli “Interpretazioni grafiche delle opere di Torquato Tasso,” in Buzzoni, Torquato Tasso tra Letteratura musica teatro e arti figurative, 85; Bartsch, 3901.163–72.

19. Whitfield, “A Programme for Erminia and the Shepherd by G. B. Agucchi,ˮ 218–20; Daniel M. Unger, “The Yearning for the Holy Land: Agucchi’s Program for Erminia and the Shepherds,ˮ Word & Image 24.4 (2008): 367; Giovanni Careri, La fabbrica degli affetti: La Gerusalemme liberate dai Carracci a Tiepolo (Milan: il Saggiatore, 2010), 73–81.

20. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton, 139–40.

21. According to Peter Marinelli, Peter the Hermit and the Wiseman of Ascalon balance one another, the former representing the life of reason, and the latter theology. See Peter Marinelli, “Narrative Poetry,” in The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, ed. Peter Brand and Lino Pertile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 246–47.

22. For the reunification of the church as a new crusade, see David Quint, “Political Allegory in the Gerusalemme Liberata,” Renaissance Quarterly 43.1 (1990): 2.

23. Walter Stephens, “Metaphor, Sacrament and the Problem of Allegory in Gerusalemme Liberata,ˮ I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance 4 (1991): 226–28.

24. Quint, “Political Allegory,ˮ 22.

25. On the centrality of the idea of conversion, especially the conversion of Armida, see Jane Tylus, “Reasoning Away Colonialism: Tasso and the Production of the ʽGerusalemme Liberataʼ.” South Central Review 10 (1993): 103–6. See also Gough, “Tasso’s Enchantress, Tasso’s Captive Woman,ˮ 524–26. On Erminia’s conversion, see also Migiel, “Tasso’s Erminia,ˮ 62.

26. This has been acknowledged in modern scholarship. See for example Bowra, From Virgil to Milton, 188; Fichter, Poets Historical, 113; Migiel, “Tasso’s Erminia,ˮ 68; Gough, “Tasso’s Enchantress, Tasso’s Captive Woman,ˮ 524–56.

27. Kristen Olson Murtaugh argues that Erminia and Clorinda complement each other, in “Erminia Delivered,ˮ 15. On Erminia being a virgin, see Jerusalem Delivered, 6.71, and on Clorinda’s virginity, see 2.39.

28. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton, 184.

29. Ivan Kalmar, Early Orientalism: Imagined Islam and the Notion of Sublime Power (London: Routledge, 2012), 45–50.

30. See Sir John Mandeville, The Book of Marvels and Travels, trans. Anthony Bale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 62; George Sandys, A Relation of a Journey Begun an. Dom. 1610, in Four Books (London: John Williams Jr., 1673), 46–47.

31. Kalmar, Early Orientalism, 42–43.

32. For printed travelogues of this type, see F. Thomas Noonan, The Road to Jerusalem: Pilgrimage and Travel in the Age of Discovery (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 133–35.

33. The term used by Homi Bhabha is “a gaze of otherness,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2005), 126–31.

34. Waterhouse, “Tasso and the Visual Arts,” 147. See also Chastel, “Gli artisti di Tasso,ˮ 202.

35. On the importance of Armida’s beauty, see also Venturi, “Armide ou le paysage au miroir,ˮ 231. See also Gough, “Tasso’s Enchantress, Tasso’s Captive Woman,ˮ 533; Gregory, “Tasso’s God,ˮ 584.

36. In that, Armida follows Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Angelica, who in Orlando Innamorato ignites the desires of Charlemagne and the knights surrounding him. For comparison, see Jo Ann Cavallo, The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso: From Public Duty to Private Pleasure (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 186–88. Tasso’s main characters and their resemblance to famous women from other epics has received much scholarly attention. David Quint summarizes this eclecticism and imitation in “Francesco Bracciolini as a Reader of Ariosto and Tasso in La croce racquistata,” in L’arme e gli amori: Ariosto, Tasso and Guerini in Late Renaissance Florence, ed. Massimiliano Rosi and Fiorella Giofredi Superbi, 2 vols. (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2001), 1.59–77.

37. See Gough, “Tasso’s Enchantress, Tasso’s Captive Woman,ˮ 533; Gregory, “Tasso’s God,ˮ 584.

38. See Yavneh, “The Threat of Sensuality,ˮ 168–69 and 171–74; Naomi Yavneh, “The Ambiguity of Beauty in Tasso and Petrarch,” in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 135 and 140–43. See also Sergio Zatti, “Epic in the Age of Dissimulation: Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberate,ˮ in Renaissance Transactions: Ariosto and Tasso, ed. Valeria Finucci (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 119–24; Elizabeth Cropper, “On Beautiful Women, Parmigianino, Petrarchismo and the Vernacular Style,ˮ Art Bulletin 58.3 (1976): 385–86.

39. Mary Margaret Jewett, Canon Pietro Casola’s Pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the Year 1494 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1907), 257; Sandys, A Relation of Journey, 85.

40. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, 49.

41. Cropper, “On Beautiful Women,ˮ 385–86; Yavneh, “The Threat of Sensuality,ˮ 171–74, and “The Ambiguity of Beauty in Tasso and Petrarch,” 141–43.

42. Agnolo Firenzuola, Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne (Venice: Giovan Grissio, 1552), 25 and 32. For the English translation, see Agnolo Firenzuola, On the Beatuy of Women, trans. and ed. Konrad Eisenbichler and Jacqueline Murray (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 33 and 46.

43. Berdini, “Women under the Gaze,ˮ 566, 567.

44. Patricia Simons, “Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture,ˮ History Workshop 25 (1988): 8.

45. Gianni Venturi, “Armide ou le paysage au miroir,” in La Jérusalem délivrée du Tasse: Poésie, peinture, musique, ballet, ed. Giovanni Careri (Paris: Klincksiesk and Musée du Louvre, 1999), 238.

46. For the mirror as indicating the falsity of what one sees, see Faye Tudor, “All in him selfe as in a glass he sees: Mirrors and Vision in the Renaissance,” in Renaissance Theories of Vision, ed. John Shannon Hendrix and Charles H. Carman (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 175. See also Venturi, “Armide ou le paysage au miroir,ˮ 240.

47. Prater discusses the mirror motif in Velázquez’s Venus at her Mirror (Rokeby Venus) and its Venetian predecessors. See Andreas Prater, Venus at Her Mirror: Velázquez and the Art of Nude Painting (Munich: Prestel, 2002), 21.

48. On the prints and their meaning, see Sara F. Matthews-Grieco, “Satyrs and Sausages: Erotic Strategies and the Print Market in Cinquecento Italy,ˮ in Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy, ed. Sara F. Matthews-Grieco (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 29. See also David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 362. This print is also attributed to Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael. See, for example, Jan L. de Jong, “Spying and Speculating: Francesco Salviati’s Painting of King David and Bathsheba in the Palazzo Ricci-Sacchetti in Rome,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 79.2 (2010): 97–98. For the Mirror motif, see Yavneh, “The Threat of Sensuality,ˮ 145. See, also, Prater, Venus at her Mirror, 58–59.

49. See Feigenbaum’s entry in Emiliani, Ludovico Carracci, 85. For the drawing, see Babette Bohn, Ludovico Carracci and the Art of Drawing (Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2004), 221–22.

50. Careri, La fabbrica degli affetti, 78–79. See also Milovan Stanić, who identified the opposite hand gestures as signifying vita activa vs vita contemplativa. Milovan Stanić, “Herminie dans le paradis artificial des bergers Avatar dʼun motif tassien dans la peinture du XVIIe siècle,” in La Jérusalem délivrée du Tasse: Poésie, peinture, musique, ballet, ed. Giovanni Careri (Paris: Klincksiesk and Musée du Louvre, 1999), 22–23.

51. See Daniel M. Unger, Guercino’s Painting and His Patrons’ Politics in Early Modern Italy (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 6.

52. Anthony Colantuono, “The Cup and the Shield: Lorenzo Lippi, Torquato Tasso and Seventeenth-Century Pictorial Stylistics,ˮ in L’arme e gli amori: Ariosto, Tasso and Guerini in Late Renaissance Florence, ed. Massimiliano Rosi and Fiorella Giofredi Superbi, 2 vols. (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2001), 2.412.

53. Elsewhere Tasso refers to the concealing helmet explicitly. In canto 18 Armida’s spectre emerging from the myrtle confronts Rinaldo in the forest and says: “Take off this helmet now; discover your face, and your eyes to mine, if you are come as friendˮ (18.32).

54. For the downcast eyes and tilted head formula, see Berdini, “Women under the Gaze,ˮ 568; Simons, “Women in Frames,ˮ 21.

55. See Rensselaer W. Lee, “Erminia in Minneapolis,ˮ in Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, 1660–1800: Essays in Honor of Samuel Holt Monk, ed. Howard Anderson and John S. Shea (Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1967), 42.

56. Just prior to the battle with Tancred, Clorinda discovers her Christian origins. She was born to the king and queen of Ethiopia, but because she was white, immediately after birth her mother, fearing the king’s envy and anger, sent her away. Clorinda was then raised as a Saracen and became a very able and talented warrior. As such she was recruited by Aladine and became a formidable enemy of the crusaders. Throughout the poem her strength lies in her loyalty to the Saracens, on the one hand, and her morality, on the other hand. In this scene, she fights to the bitter end, and only then does she ask Tancred to baptize her. In an article on Lorenzo Lippi’s unique approach to both Ariosto and Tasso in his paintings, Anthony Colantuono proposes Aristotle’s “metaphor by analogy” in Lippi’s representation of Angelica tending Medoro’s wounds. Lippi, according to Colantuono, added Medoro’s shield as a vessel for preparing the cure for the wounded hero. The shield, albeit failing to protect Medoro, thus becomes a means of healing in Angelica’s hands. We may apply this Aristotelian reference to Tasso’s use of the helmet as both protecting Tancred and providing Clorinda with her final benediction. See Colantuono, “The Cup and the Shield,” 2.400–401.

57. Careri, La fabbrica degli affetti, 85.

58. Murtaugh, “Erminia Delivered,ˮ 14.

59. On this rendition, see Daniele Benati and Angelo Mazza, eds. Alessandro Tiarini: La grande stagione della pittura del ’600 a Reggio (Reggio Emilia: Federico Motta Editore, 2002), cat. no. 81.

60. Mikhail Alpatov, “Poussin’s Tancred and Erminia in the Hermitage: An Interpretation,” in Studies in Renaissance & Baroque Art Presented to Anthony Blunt on his 60^th Birthday, ed. Jeanne Courtauld et al. (London: Phaidon, 1967), 133.

61. Plock, “Watching Women Watching Warriors,ˮ 139–47.

62. Another painting of this scene, inspired by Poussin, was made by the French painter Charles Errard (Queen’s Hotel, Cheltenham), where Erminia is again just about to cut her hair to tend to Tancred’s wounds.

63. Titian’s version, today at the Prado in Madrid, seems to have been in Spain long before Guercino was even born. For Bonasone’s engraving after Titian’s Entombment, see Hans Tietze, Titian: The Paintings and Drawings (London: Phaidon Press, 1950), 380; Thomas Ketelsen, “A Drawing for Giulio Bonasone’s Print after Titian’s Entombment,ˮ Burlington Magazine 138 (1996): 446–53.

64. Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice: Vite de` pittori Bolognesi, ed. G. P. C. Zanotti et al., 2 vols. (1678; Bologna: Tipografia Guidi all’Ancora, 1841), 2.267; Luigi Salerno, I dipinti del Guercino (Rome: U. Bozzi, 1988), cat. no. 285; Michael Helston and Tom Henry, Guercino in Britain: Paintings from British Collections, ed. Michael Helston (London: National Gallery Publications, 1991), exh. no. 30.