Rinaldo and Armida
Body-color on three sheets of vellum joined horizontally and mounted on panel, heightened in mordant-gilding. In a contemporary giltwood trophy frame (an earl’s coronet with additional black and red above, a Saracen’s head with additional red and black below). Glazed, with a modern wooden support behind. Small peripherally, as well as along the lower vellum join at right; the upper join visible but stable. (Not viewed out of frame.) Rubbing to the frame, with some an opening joint along the lower edge, stabilized verso with adhesive.
The Les Vélins du Roi is the body of miniature paintings (some 6,984) on vellum produced at a royal manufactory based at Les Invalides under Louis XIII, Louis XIV and Louis XV. The artists drew technical inspiration from medieval illumination (in fact, the English word “miniature” comes from the Italian word for “illumination,” miniatura, which in turn comes from minium, Latin for the cinnabar pigment with which the preparatory drawing was executed), while the aesthetic sensibility reflects the influence of Antoine Coypel. Madeleine Françoise Basseporte (1701–1780) was the only artist producing the Vélins known to have painted subjects other than botanicals; she was trained by Claude Aubriet and began her career in pastel portraiture.
During her early years in Les Vélins, Basseporte collaborated on a chiaroscuro woodcut titled Diana and Endymion with Nicholas Le Sueur, which bears a striking compositional resemblance to the present work. Le Sueur carved and printed the piece, while Basseporte is credited with supervising the design and production; her name appears on the print’s attribution as “sous la conduite de M.le Basseporte.” Basseporte was named Miniature Painter to the King around the same time she received the title of “Peintre des Plantes du Jardin du Roi.” She rubbed shoulders with Carolus Linnaeus and contributed to the works of Noel-Antoine Pluche and Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau. This miniature work thus serves as an early ode to the shifting tides of noble Frenchman’s priorities; it flouts history and flaunts a luxurious finish, but a tale of burgeoning enlightenment ideals churns just below the façade.
The subject derives from Torquato Tasso’s 1581 epic Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered). Set during the First Crusade at the end of the XIc, the poem relates encounters between Christian knights and Saracen adversaries. Here, within the enchanted garden of the Saracen sorceress Armida, the crusader Rinaldo gazes into a mirror she holds before him. In the background at right, his companions Carlo and Ubaldo are seen peering into the bower:
These windings pass’d, the garden-gates unfold,
And the fair Eden meets their glad survey —
Still waters, moving crystals, sands of gold,
Herbs, thousand flowers, rare shrubs, and mosses gray,
Sunshiny hillocks, shady vales; woods gay
And grottoes gloomy, in one view combined,
Presented were; and what increased their play
Of pleasure at the prospect, was, to find
Nowhere the happy Art that had the whole design’d
…
Midst melody so tender, midst delights
So passing sweet, and midst such tempting snares,
Cautious, serene, and serious go the knights,
And steel their souls to the loose Lydian airs.
Lo, betwixt leaves and leaves, at unawares
Advancing slow, they see, or seem to see, —
They see most surely, crown of all their cares!
The lover and his darling lady; he
In the fair lady’s lap, on herbs and violets she.
…
A polish’d glass, whose sheen the stars excell’d,
Strange arms! Hung pendent at Rinaldo’s thigh;
He rose, and to the fair crystal held,
Her chosen page in each love-mystery:
Both — she with smiling, he with glowing eye,
Mark but one scene of all the scenes they view;
Her angel form and aspect they descry,
She in the glass, he, fond enthusiast! through
A sweeter medium fan — her eyes of heavenly blue.
(Canto XVI, trans. J. H. Wiffen)
In the mirror, Rinaldo beholds a reflection altered by idleness, indulgence, and the seductions of love — a visage no longer shaped by valor, but softened by distraction. This moment of recognition tears him from the throes of passion and compels his return to the Crusade for the Christians of Europe.
The frame yields clues to an earlier owner: Horace Walpole (1717–1797), 4th Earl of Orford, a Member of Parliament the British remembered for pioneering the English Gothic with The Castle of Otranto (1764). In 1739, Walpole embarked on a grand tour of France and Italy with his friend and fellow writer, Thomas Gray. Perhaps the present work — the Saracen Armida evoking his armorial crest, a Saracen’s Head — was a souvenir from time spent with Gray in France.
The Rococo trophy frame[1] is likely Irish, made perhaps in the Dublin workshop of either John Houghton or Richard Cranfield. The frame’s left and right sides are carved columns topped with fleurons that form an arc to create the upper margin of the frame. At the arc’s zenith, an earl’s coronet underscores the association with Walpole, whose home Strawberry Hill is decorated with Saracen’s heads much like the one carved below. The frame and the picture harmoniously flatter the owner as well as reference the Oriental themes raised by the poem.
Rinaldo and Armida was acquired by Jordan and Thomas A. Saunders III at Christie’s New York 28 January 2000, lot 57. Thomas A. Saunders III (1936–2022) was a partner and longtime managing director of Morgan Stanley and co-founded the private equity firm Saunders, Karp, & Megrue. A dedicated philanthropist and chairman of the Heritage Foundation, Saunders was awarded the National Humanities Medal by George W. Bush in 2008. Rinaldo and Armida was displayed at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for their exhibition of Saunders’s prolific collection, Elegance and Wonder: Masterpieces of European Art from the Jordan and Thomas A. Saunders III Collection 20 March 2023–30 January 2025. It was lot 127 in their Sotheby’s New York sale “Elegance & Wonder,” 22 May 2025, lot 127.
[1] Our thanks to Ms. Lynn Roberts for her analysis of the frame.
Item #GRM0030
Price: $90,000