Angelica and the Hermit

Angelica and the Hermit (c. 1620) at the Kunsthistorisches Museum depicts a scene from Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso — the Italian Renaissance epic that was as central to seventeenth-century humanist culture as Ovid's Metamorphoses and Homer's epics. Angelica, the beautiful princess who drives the paladin Orlando mad with love, is discovered sleeping by a lustful hermit who has used a magic potion to render her unconscious — a subject whose moral ambiguity (the exploitation of a helpless woman by a figure of supposed spiritual authority) is handled by Ariosto with comic irony and by Rubens with characteristic directness. The Ariostian source demonstrates the range of Rubens's literary engagement: his humanist education encompassed not only the classical texts that provided most of his mythological subjects but also the Italian Renaissance epic tradition that had been reshaping European literary culture since Ariosto's poem appeared in its final form in 1532. The Kunsthistorisches Museum's Vienna collection holds this work alongside major Rubens mythological and religious compositions that collectively demonstrate the full range of his literary and theological learning.

The composition contrasts the luminous beauty of the sleeping Angelica with the coarse features of the hermit. Rubens' masterly flesh painting creates a powerful contrast between youth and age, beauty and ugliness.

This painting from Ariosto's epic has been conserved over the centuries. The canvas has been relined. The contrast between the luminous female figure and the dark surrounding landscape has been preserved through careful cleaning and varnish maintenance.