Word: armida
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...weren't original; their handling became increasingly so. Over his working life--roughly 50 years--Tiepolo didn't use any narratives in his painting that weren't already familiar. There are the figures from antiquity (Achilles, Dido, Alexander, Scipio), the heroes and heroines out of Renaissance literature (Rinaldo and Armida from Tasso's epic Gerusalemme liberata), the biblical patriarchs and Madonnas and martyrs, the allegorical figures of Virtue or Envy or the Four Continents, the flocks of putti as dense as pigeons in the piazza. All these had swarmed across every painted surface in Venice for generations before Tiepolo...
...from formal to intimate portraiture, from state commemoration to religious allegory. His big religious paintings, mostly for Flemish churches, are bravura performances, but none of them have the trumpeting conviction or the sheer inventiveness of Rubens'. His best paintings were his portraits and his secular allegories, like Rinaldo and Armida, 1629, done under the spell of Titian. Taken from Tasso's epic poem Jerusalem Delivered, a great favorite at Charles' court, it illustrates the moment when the sorceress Armida falls in love with the wandering Christian knight Rinaldo on glimpsing his sleeping face. The sensuous color, the glow of flesh...