The subject illustrated in the work is drawn from a passage of Canto XIX of “Jerusalem Liberated”, in which Vafrino summons Erminia, having found Tancredi wounded following his duel with Argante: “At the name of Tancredi, she ran swiflly,/ like one drunk and frantic./ On seeing the colourless and handsome face,/ she did not get down, she hurled herself from the saddle”.

Themes drawn from the poem of Tasso enjoyed enormous popularity among seventeenth-century artists, on account of their richly imaginative and erotic content, in which the passion and the sentiment of the tragic alternate at the very brink of reality and the fantastical. The picture comes from the artist’s juvenile phase, in which he touches an expressive zenith, foreshadowing the Roman masterpieces of 1621-23. Guercino puts into it his pictorial concept of that moment, in which figures are constructed by way of large and powerful patches of colour, animated by a strongly dynamic and mobile light.

The scenographical framing of the figures, which are very near the ideal plane of the picture and cut off outside it, is adopted to intensify the emotional impact of the scene on the viewer. The picture is mentioned under the year 1618 by Malvasia in the “Felsina pittrice”: “He did a wounded Tancredi found by Erminia, having fought with Argante, for Sig. Marcello Provenzali from Cento, who was very famous for his skill in mosaics; and this picture was given by the aforementioned to Cardinal Pignatelli”.

The work appears in the inventory of 1657-58 of the possessions of Donna Olimpia Maidalchini Pamphilj in her residence at San Martino al Cimino. In 1666 it is an inventory of her son, Camillo Pamphilj, to then appear in those of Giovan Battista Pamphilj the younger in 1682 and 1725.

Stefano Pignatelli, who commissioned it, friend of Scipione Borghese, nephew of Paul V and created cardinal in 1621, died in 1623. It would be reasonable, therefore, to believe that the picture was already in the hands of the cardinal even before the painter came to Rome, and may in fact have been responsible for the commission for the ceiling of San Crisogono which was given him by Scipione Borghese in 1622.

There is furthermore a counterproof engraving executed by Giovan Battista Pasqualini in 1620, which carries the quatrain of Tasso and the written words “In Roma”, to confirm that the picture was already in the city before Guercino’s arrival. The canvas was restored in 1956, at the time of the collapse of the ceiling in the Aldobrandini Room.