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| Angelica and Medoro |
Artist:François Boucher (French, Paris 1703–1770 Paris)
Date:1763
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:Oval, 26 1/4 x 22 1/8 in. (66.7 x 56.2 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:The Jack and Belle Linsky Collection, 1982
Catalogue Entry
In 1765, two years after these pictures were painted, they were presented at the Paris Salon as a loan from the fermier général Bergeret de Grancourt and titled Jupiter transformé en Diane pour surprendre Calisto and Angélique & Médor. Both are signed and one is dated. They share a distinguished history, having belonged also to Sir Richard Wallace. It is evident that the paintings were planned as a pair and they are complementary, in the opposing gestures of Diana and Medoro, in the repetition of the leopard skins and quivers of arrows and of the putti with firebrands, and in the arrangement of the sheltering trunks and branches of the trees in the background. Complex, elaborate compositions of the kind must have come naturally to Boucher, the sixty year old king’s painter and director of the Académie Royale.
The subject of the second work would not come so readily to the fore were it not for the fact that the identification with the mythologies shown in the 1765 Salon seems so certain: the sizes are very close to the dimensions published in the list of Salon exhibits, the shapes are oval, and the stretchers are similarly stamped with the name of their maker. Critics related that at the time Boucher had been too ill to paint on a grand scale and this would further explain his having shown canvases that were not absolutely contemporary in date. The story of Angelica and Medoro is taken from the epic narrative Orlando Furioso by the sixteenth-century Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto. Angelica was the pagan daughter of the king of Cathay. She abandoned the Christian knight Orlando who is the hero of the tale for a Moorish soldier, Medoro, when Cupid wounded her with a dart. The couple stayed together in a herdsman’s hut and everywhere they went, indoors and out, Angelica carved their names.
Katharine Baetjer 2014
Copyright Image
https://images.metmuseum.org
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