A young woman in armour, her horse tied to a tree behind her, has wandered into a kind of rustic concert. A shepherd and his family are sitting outside their cottage; the elderly father weaves baskets out of reeds and his sons hold musical instruments.

This pastoral idyll is a scene from an epic poem, Jerusalem Delivered, published in 1581 by Torquato Tasso, the greatest Italian poet of the late Renaissance. Erminia, a Muslim princess, has fallen in love with Tancred, a Christian knight, and disguised herself as a soldier in order to find him. At one point she takes refuge with a shepherd’s family and shares their bucolic life.

We are not sure who painted this picture, but it was presumably one of the many artists trained in the academy run by the Carracci family in Bologna. It has recently been attributed to the Bolognese painter Franceso Albani, who may have painted it while he was in Rome in 1609–10.