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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...