The Sorcerer Atlante Abducting Pinabello’s Lady (Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, canto II, 38)

Description

Nicolas Poussin’s The Sorcerer Atlante Abducting Pinabello’s Lady takes its subject from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Drawn around 1635–38 in brown ink, the scene places a flying, winged horse with its riders toward the upper right, above a mounted warrior below. Fine lines and scattered indications of shrubs keep the setting open, allowing the upward movement to carry the composition’s supernatural drama.

Pen drawing gives Poussin a means of organizing action through the direction and grouping of forms. Rather than relying on painted color, the scene’s movement must be carried by relationships among bodies, gestures and the space around them. That concentration invites the viewer to trace how a literary event acquires pictorial order. The sheet also has black chalk on its reverse, but the represented drawing belongs to the inked narrative side, whose marks preserve the immediacy of the artist’s invention.

Read our guide to giclée prints or browse the Nicolas Poussin collection.