Landscape with Erminia by Agostino Tassi in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 2022

Title: Landscape with Erminia

Artist: Agostino Tassi (Italian, Ponzano Romano ca. 1580–1644 Rome)

Date: ca. 1630

Medium: Oil on wood

Dimensions: 12 7/8 × 18 in. (32.7 × 45.7 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: Thaw Collection, Jointly Owned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Morgan Library & Museum, Gift of Eugene V. Thaw, 2013

Accession Number: 2013.197


This small and delicate painting is of particular importance for our understanding of the transformations in landscape painting in early seventeenth-century Rome—a period in which a renewed attention to the study of nature and an interest in the light effects of various times of day intersected with the Venetian tradition of idealized, pastoral landscape. Tassi depicts an episode from Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), first published in 1581. The pagan warrior Erminia, in love with the Christian Tancred, writes his name on a tree in the forest as a sign of her love for him. In 1612, Tassi was convicted of raping the artist Artemisia Gentileschi.

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/440326