Adventures of Angelica: Early Frescoes Illustrating theOrlando furioso

Abstract

The Orlando furioso, first published in 1516, enjoyed high popularity in sixteenth-century Italy, appearing in over 154 editions,1 more than half of them illustrated with woodcuts or engravings at the beginning of each canto. But if graphic artists of moderate talent did the poem some justice,2 it did not inspire nearly the number of paintings that might have been expected from such a masterpiece, and this was true not only during the first century of its life, but in succeeding centuries as well. Its artistic progeny was, in fact, to be far less in quantity and, with notable exceptions, inferior in quality to that of its arch-rival at the end of the sixteenth century, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata.