The traditional identification of the subject (among English-language art historians) as an illustration of the episode from Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered in which Armida discovers the sleeping Rinaldo and prepares to abduct him on her chariot (Canto XIV, verses 65 ff.) is highly questionable. The iconography of the episode from Tasso had already been well established by famous seventeenth-century paintings (specifically the versions by Poussin, now in Moscow, and by Van Dyck, now in Los Angeles). According to this tradition the episode takes place in a natural setting beside a spring where nymphs are bathing, under the eyes of winged cupids suspended in flight above the hero; Rinadlo always wears armor and a warrior's clothing. By contrast, the event depicted by Cades seems to take place indoors, or in some unidentifiable setting, and the sleeping young man is naked, apart from the drapery and footwear. Although iconography of this drawing cannot as yet be resolved, therefore, it may be drawn from a work of literature (probably by a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century writer) or else an allegory, in the spirit of Tommaso Mindardi's later Tasso Meditating on the Figure of Beauty, in which a radiantly beautiful young woman stands before a drowning man (Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome). In any case, it is most improbable that Cades would have treated a subject taken from Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered with such freedom: the tendency in the literary painting of his day, which was already anticipating Romantic history painting, was, rather, to stick faithfully to the text and render its details precisely.

A brilliant if erratic artistic personality of great originality and chameleon-like contradictions, Giuseppe Cades was one of the best history painters in Rome during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. He was a precocious beginner whose mature style continued the late Roman classical Baroque manner at the same time that it adopted an avant-garde neo-Mannerism and extravagant, fantastic, romantic Neoclassicsm. Today Cades seems years ahead of his time, almost a nineteenth-century painter, in his romantic depiction of themes from Italy's medieval and Renaissance past and his attempts to achieve verisimilitude in period costumes and architecture. Although its subject is not clear, this drawing was undoubtedly created as a finished work in itself, the equivalent of a small painting. With its layering of fine, parallel shading lines, its subtle use of color, and its atmospheric contrast of light and dark, the sheet is a masterpiece of Cades's fluent and imaginative drawn oeuvre as well as a keystone of the Museum's splendid holding of eighteenth-century Roman drawings. Ann Percy, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 222.