Angelica and Medoro

Angelica and Medoro at the Metropolitan Museum (1763) illustrates a romantic episode from Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516–32), the epic poem about Charlemagne's paladins that was the most widely read secular text in Renaissance and Baroque Italy and France. Angelica, the beautiful princess who had been the object of Orlando's obsessive love, secretly marries the wounded Saracen warrior Medoro, and the two lovers carve their names on a tree as a permanent record of their union. This act of woodland inscription — love made permanent through writing — inspired countless painters and poets throughout the early modern period. Boucher's treatment in 1763, late in his career, shows his undiminished mastery of the pastoral romantic subject, the lovers presented in an idealized forest glade with the characteristic Rococo combination of literary elegance and sensuous visual pleasure. The Metropolitan's French collection provides the institutional context for understanding Boucher's place within the long tradition of French painters engaged with Italian literary sources.

Boucher's characteristic soft, idealized flesh painting creates figures of decorative beauty in a lush landscape setting. The warm palette of pinks and golds against cool greens demonstrates the Rococo color harmonies he perfected.