Evoking the melodramatic splendor of eighteenth-century opera, this masterful painting formed the model for one of Charles-Antoine Coypel’s most important commissions: a quartet of grand tapestries constituting the Tenture des Fragments d’Opèra, a series that decorated the Versailles apartments of Queen Maria Leszczyńska (1703-1768), Louis XV’s wife and Coypel’s most important patron. Executed in 1737, the modello depicts the theatrical denouement of the opera Armide, which climaxes in a dramatic scene of destruction caused by unrequited love and abandonment.

Part of a powerful artistic dynasty, Charles-Antoine Coypel worked as an actor and playwright before devoting himself to painting.¹ Even after his turn from the performing to the visual arts, Coypel maintained connections with the theater, which remained an important source of creative inspiration throughout his career. The Tenture des Fragments d’Opèra tapestries, produced by the Royal Gobelins Manufactory in Paris between 1733 and 1741, illustrate scenes from the seventeenth-century operas Roland and Armide, composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully with libretti by Jean-Baptiste-Maurice Quinault. The former, based on Ludovico Ariosto’s Renaissance epic Orlando Furioso, inspired Coypel’s Marriage of Angelique and Roland, and the latter, considered Lully and Quinault’s masterpiece and based on Torquato Tasso’s crusader poem Gerusalemme Liberata, or Jerusalem Delivered, inspired the final three works, the Sleep of Renaud, Fainting of Armide, and Destruction of the Palace of Armide.

In Lully and Quinault’s opera, when the beguiling pagan sorceresses Armide, who delights in destroying Christian knights, encounters the Crusader, Renaud, she finds herself unable to kill him, instead falling in love. She whisks him away to her magical island, where she bewitches him into believing that he reciprocates her feelings. Carlo and Ubaldo, two of Renaud’s companions, find Renauld, reveal Armide’s spell, and save him from her snare. Renaud abandons Armide, who descends into a self-destructive fury. Brandishing her magic wand, she casts her final spell: as lightning bolts flash across the sky, she condemns her pleasure palace to ruin. She flies away on a dragon, while five winged demons rend apart the palace’s architectural fabric. They hurl broken drums as fractured entablatures and toppled capitals lie scattered across the foreground, in the center of which lies a fragmented torso beside assorted truncated limbs.

It was with the Tenture des Fragments d’Opèra series that the Gobelins established the “Coypel Regulation,” whereby artists were required to submit two models to the manufactory: a modello, like the present work, referred to as an “original en petit,” and a large cartoon that served as the weavers’ to-scale template. Coypel retained the small modello; the cartoon is in Nancy (fig. 1). Several tapestries of this composition survive, the best preserved of which is in the Rijksmuseum (fig. 2).

¹ His father and teacher, Antoine Coypel, served as the premier peintre du roi; Charles-Antoine's grandfather, Noël Coypel, was the director of the French Academy in Rome.