Ruggero salva Angelica

Ruggero Rescuing Angelica, painted around 1733, depicts the episode from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso in which the Christian knight Ruggero rides his hippogriff to save the nude Angelica chained to a rock — a scene deliberately modeled on the Perseus and Andromeda myth. Ariosto's epic poem, published in its final form in 1532, was the foundational text of Venetian literary culture: Titian had illustrated it for Alfonso d'Este, and the tradition of painting Ariosto subjects had run continuously through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Tiepolo claimed this tradition as definitively as he had claimed Tasso, creating multiple treatments of the Ruggero and Angelica episode across canvases, oil sketches, and fresco programs. The hippogriff — half horse, half eagle — was one of the great inventions of Renaissance literary fantasy, and for a painter who excelled in defying gravity and filling aerial space with figures, it was an irresistible subject. In 1733 Tiepolo was also reading Ariosto in the context of the Villa Loschi frescoes, where literary subjects decorated rooms designed for learned leisure.

The swooping diagonal of the hippogriff creates powerful movement across the canvas, with Angelica chained to the rock providing the static counterpoint. Brilliant, light-filled color and dynamic foreshortening demonstrate Tiepolo's gift for making the fantastic seem visually convincing.