Tasso and Eleonore d'Este

Makart painted Tasso and Eleonore d'Este in 1869, placing himself squarely within the Romantic tradition of depicting episodes from the life of the sixteenth-century Italian poet Torquato Tasso, whose stormy relationship with the Este court at Ferrara had fascinated writers and artists since Goethe's play of 1790. The legend held that Tasso fell dangerously in love with Princess Eleonore, a liaison that contributed to his imprisonment in the asylum of Sant'Anna. For nineteenth-century Romantics this story condensed the tragedy of the misunderstood genius — ardent, doomed, and crushed by aristocratic convention. Makart's interpretation, now in Berlin's Alte Nationalgalerie, emphasises the intimate tension of the encounter: the poet gazes at the princess with an intensity that makes the social gulf between them palpable. The 1869 date places the work in Makart's pre-Vienna years, when he was still refining his mature style in Munich and on Italian study trips. The subject also allowed him to render the brocades and velvets of the Italian Renaissance court, anticipating the decorative richness of his later grand machines.

Oil on canvas combining a warm, jewel-toned palette derived from Venetian Renaissance models with the dramatic chiaroscuro favoured by the Munich school. Makart renders silk brocade with descriptive detail while treating background architecture loosely, focusing attention on the charged exchange between the two figures.