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The painting was commissioned in 1618 (significantly the date of the start of the Thirty Years War) by the famous mosaicist Marcello Provenzali da Cento, but was probably not finished by the painter until the following year. A seventeenth-century copy that is about ten centimetres wider, in a private collection in Paris in 1987, suggests that the left side of the painting, where the Parisian composition appears more developed, may have been cut off.
According to Torquato Tasso's account in Gerusalemme Liberata (canto XIX, 104-14), Tancred, after being wounded by Argante during the siege of Jerusalem, is helped by Vafrino. On removing Tancred's armor and discovering his wounds, he tells Erminia. Erminia tends her lover's bloody wounds with the braided tresses of her own hair. The depiction of the subject was influenced by two famous Christian themes: The Lament over the Dead Christ and St Sebastian Tended by Pious Women.
The monumental and animated drama of the composition, which seems to burst out of the confines of the frame, the strong contrasts of light and shade, the velvety colours, the highly original style, the ivory-tinted flesh tones, and the gamut of yellows, ochers, and oily gray-greens make this undoubted masterpiece, in which he meditates on the examples set by Bassano and Fetti, one of the artist's most outstanding works.
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