The composition is based on a painting, Rinaldo and Armida, by Michele Rocca (1671–after 1751), now in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. The subject represents a passage from Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (XVI, 17–25), where, in the enchanted garden of the sorceress Armida, the captive Rinaldo sees his own reflection in her eyes as she gazes at herself in a mirror. Rinaldo’s companions, Carlo and Ubaldo, hide in bushes beyond.

The workshop of Francesco Depoletti (1779–1854) was located at 32 via Condotti. Documentary evidence and surviving examples of his work suggest that he specialised in making copies after the Old Masters. At the first Capitoline exhibition of art and industry held in Rome in 1811 he was awarded a silver medal for mosaics, including replicas of Guido Reni’s Aurora and a landscape by Salvator Rosa. Later, in a letter to Giacomo Raffaelli dated 10 June 1817, he mentions making copies commissioned by Count Nikolai Demidov (1773–1828) of two paintings by Claude Lorrain (c.1600–1682), possibly those in the Galleria Doria, Rome.

The present work is representative of Depoletti’s reductive technique where the composition is rendered in bold blocks of colour rather than by fine tonal shading, an approach also evident in his mosaic of Father Time and the Three Fates in the Gilbert Collection. In 1824 Depoletti was invited to Naples by Ferdinando I, King of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (1751 1825), to establish a school in Naples for mosaics and to work on the mosaic decoration of the church of San Francesco di Paola, projects that ended with the death of the king the following year. While in Naples he came into contact with Daniele Sabano, a skilled restorer at the Real Museo Borbonico; once back in Rome, Depoletti established an international reputation as a restorer of Etruscan vases.

minimize...