Armida and the sleeping Rinaldo on a chariot drawn by dragons and escorted by putti

Datable to Luigi Sabatelli’s years in Rome (1789-1794), a time of a resurgence of interest in Renaissance literature by Italian artists, this large drawing depicts a passage from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (canto 14, stanze 67-69). Abducting the Christian knight Rinaldo in her chariot drawn by dragons, the sorceress Armida fell under the spell of his beauty and ‘from enemy, became a lover’, decorating him with a garland of flowers. Sabatelli’s graphic tour de force took its inspiration, apart from Tasso’s poem, from Guercino’s ceiling of the same subject in the Palazzo Costaguti in Rome as well as from French Neoclassical artists. It is one of a group of 14 drawings of substantial size, still together in the collection of marchese Gino Capponi, including an illustration to Ariosto’s Orlando furioso now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (inv. 1999-3-1; Cazort, op. cit., no. 62, ill.); and a probably lost one with a subject taken from Dante’s Divina Commedia (B. Paolozzi Strozzi in Luigi Sabatelli (1772-1850). Disegni e incisioni, Florence, 1978, p. 32, under no. 16; for other drawings based on Tasso, see Sabatelli, op. cit., pp. 34-5, nos. 1, 5, 9). Unlike these compositions and most of the artist’s other works, the present drawing shows a more feminine and graceful side of Sabatelli’s talent, which takes full advantage of the ornamental possibilities offered by the subject.