Rinaldo and Armida

This drawing comes from an album comprising drawings by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, once owned by Horace Walpole - an inscription on the cover read ‘Disegni a pena cuadretti Gio: Domenico figlio di Gio: Bata’: Tiepolo con alcuni disegni del sudetto’. Dismantled for sale in 1965, every drawing from this album is signed but none is dated. The album contained six drawings treating the subject of Rinaldo and Armida (Christie’s, London, 15 June 1965, lots 124-9). The epic love story of Rinaldo and Armida, from Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, was treated in a fresco decoration by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo in the Villa Valmanara, near Vicenza, which Domenico later translated into a series of etchings. The present drawing is close in size and composition to the etching from that group of the same subject (see A. Rizzi, The etchings of the Tiepolos, London, 1971, no. 143, ill.).