Angelica’s Virginity: The Orlando Furioso and the Female Body in Florentine Seicento Painting

The majority of seventeenth-century works of art based on Ariosto were created in Florence.¹ A number of these call attention to—and make deeply problematic—relationships between sight, desire, and touch. Examining paintings with the story of Angelica from the Orlando Furioso, I shall argue that artists used the poem to explore issues of pictorial representation that were particular to the first part of the seventeenth century, when the quest for more naturalistic painterly modalities led to a reinvestment in the erotic capabilities of painting.

Angelica, the princess of Cathay, makes her first appearance in Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato. The king has sent her together with her brother Argalia to Paris, where Charlemagne is hosting a joust for Christians and Muslims. Argalia offers to fight the knights who, if they conquer him, will gain Angelica and, if they fail, enter their father’s army. The scheme backfires when Argaglia is killed, and in the Orlando Furioso Angelica finds herself chased by amorous suitors, whose main objective is taking her virginity by force.²

The most common scene in art from the Orlando Furioso is taken from Canto 19 when the newlywed Anglica and Medoro carve their names on trees and rocks as tokens of their mutual affection. Having fallen in love with the wounded soldier Medoro, whom she has nursed back to health, Angelica finds herself dying from her passion for the youth. She declares her love for him and they have sexual intercourse before proceeding to marriage (OF 19.33.1–8). Representations of the couple include this moral ambiguity by showing Angelica in a state of undress. In the aftermath of the scandal that broke out when Marcantonio Raimondi (c. 1480–c. 1534) engraved Giulio Romano’s (c. 1499–1546) I Modi, Mannerist artists depicted love-making couples with intertwined limbs to suggest coitus without actually showing it.³ For instance, Giorgio Ghisi’s (c. 1520–84) engraving after a design by his brother Teodoro (1536–1601) pictures the undressed Angelica seated on Medoro’s thigh and positioned between his spread legs as she embraces him while he carves his name beneath hers on a tree (OF 19.36.1–8) (Fig. 1).⁴ As Charles Dempsey has observed, the engraving recalls Ariosto’s metaphors of lovers clinging to one another like the vine to the oak or the ivy to the elm tree, which is exactly what one sees behind the couple. Unlike the nervous energy of the bodily torsions seen in the print, artists after 1600 would picture the encounter in a more tranquil, pastoral mode, testifying to the change in literary taste in the aftermath of Torquato Tasso’s lyricism and the successes of Giovanni Battista Guarini’s Il Pastor fido and later that of L’Adone by Giambattista Marino. A painting by the French baroque artist Jacques Blanchard (1600–38) shows the lovers united in carving a single trunk, their raised arms forming a single, interlocking contour. This alludes to the nodi of the letters of their carved names as described by Ariosto (OF, 19.36.8) (fig. 2).⁵ In such pastoral interpretations the nudity of Angelica emphasizes post-coital, matrimonial bliss.

From the scenes of Angelica in love I shall now turn to her plight, described earlier in the poem, as she strives to survive in a foreign world of chivalry and armed warfare. Painted for the Marquis Bartolomeo del Monte sometime before 1630, the Florentine Jacopo Vignali’s

Figure 1.

Giorgio Ghisi after Teodoro Ghisi, Angelica and Medoro, engraving, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photograph provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

(1592–1664) Sacripante and Angelica focuses on the topos of male desire for an untouched woman and in turn, her attempt at using her virginity to control him (for a reproduction of the picture, please see http://www.orlandofurioso.org).⁶ Vignali painted the moment of his first awareness of her presence as he lifts his head from his melancholy pose (1.53.1...