Circle of Annibale Carracci, Erminia takes Refuge with the Shepherds

A young woman in armour, her horse tied to a tree behind her, has wandered into a kind of rustic concert. A shepherd and his family are sitting outside their cottage – you can see the thatch of the roof in the top left corner and their sheep are in a pen in the middle of the picture. The elderly father is weaving baskets out of reeds while his sons hold musical instruments.

This pastoral idyll is a scene from an epic poem, Jerusalem Delivered, published in 1581 by Torquato Tasso, the greatest Italian poet of the late Renaissance. It is a highly imaginative account of the First Crusade, with a number of romantic subplots. This picture relates to the tale of the Muslim princess Erminia, daughter of the defeated king of Antioch, who has fallen in love with a Christian knight called Tancred. Believing him wounded, she disguises herself as a soldier and sets out to find him. A series of adventures ensues, and at one point Erminia comes across an old shepherd and his sons. At first they are alarmed at the sight of such a warlike figure, but Erminia takes off her armour and tells them her story. The shepherd convinces her of the delights of rural poverty as opposed to the glories of war, and Erminia shares the bucolic life of him and his family.

We are not sure exactly who painted this picture, but it has stylistic similarities with the work of both Annibale Carracci and Domenichino. It was once attributed to Domenichino, who treated the same subject – though quite differently – in a painting now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. The picture’s vaguely classicising manner also seems to reflect Annibale’s later work. It was presumably painted by one of the many artists trained in the academy run by the Carracci family in Bologna, and has recently been attributed to the Bolognese painter Franceso Albani (1578–1660), who perhaps made it when he was in Rome in 1609–10.