Angelica and the hermit

Angelica and the Hermit by Tintoretto, painted around 1550, depicts an episode from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso where a lecherous hermit encounters the beautiful Angelica. This literary subject combined romantic adventure with the nude. Ariosto's Orlando Furioso provided Italian painters with a wealth of romantic subjects that allowed them to combine literary sophistication with sensuous beauty and dramatic incident. Jacopo Tintoretto spent his entire career in Venice producing an enormous body of work for the city's churches, confraternities, and state institutions. His synthesis of Titian's color with Michelangelesque figure power, achieved through an intense study method involving small wax models lit with dramatic sidelighting, produced a style of unprecedented dramatic intensity. His sustained productivity across five decades and his ability to maintain the highest quality of pictorial invention across the largest decorative programs in Venetian art make him one of the defining figures of the late Italian Renaissance.

The encounter between the beautiful maiden and the hermit creates a dramatic narrative composition. Tintoretto's characteristic energetic handling and warm Venetian palette bring the literary scene to life.