#Jerusalem Delivered

[indigogh0st]

Work in progress of the death of Clorinda, from Jerusalem Delivered. I’m not that fond of my previous version ahaha

[tragediambulante]

Erminia discovering the wounded Tancred, Guercino, 1618

[illustratus]

Erminia and the Shepherds by Eugène Delacroix

[swallowtail-ageha]

He was a Gerusalemme Liberata boy and she was an Orlando Furioso girl, do i need to say more?

[kinginthemask]

Traveling companion with archangel Gabriel

Inspiration comes from The Liberation of Jerusalem

[somethingwithmoles]

Sebastiano Conca (attributed to), Rinaldo and Armida, ca. 1725, oil on canvas, 99,1 x 135,9 cm, Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis

Source: Wikimedia Commons

[hercorrupterofwords]

Il modo in cui Tasso ha letteralmente saccheggiato questo poema

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

Isaiah's Message of Deliverance

1 When King Hezekiah heard the report of his officers, he tore his clothes. Then he put on rough sackcloth and he went into the Lord's temple. 2 He sent Eliakim, Shebna and the leaders of the priests to Amoz's son, Isaiah the prophet. Eliakim was the most important officer in the king's palace. Shebna was a government officer. They were all wearing sackcloth. 3 They told Hezekiah's message to Isaiah:

‘This is a time of great trouble. Assyria has insulted us to make us ashamed. Our nation is like a woman who is ready to give birth, but she is too weak to push the child out. 4 The Assyrian officer has brought a message from his king to insult the God who lives for ever. Maybe the Lord your God has heard that message. He should punish the officer for his wicked message. So please pray for the people who remain in Jerusalem.’

5 When King Hezekiah's officers told their message to Isaiah, 6 Isaiah said to them, ‘Tell your master that the Lord says this: “Do not let the words that you have heard make you afraid. The servants of the king of Assyria have insulted me, the Lord. 7 Listen to me! I will put a spirit into the king of Assyria's mind. He will hear a report which will cause him to return to his own country. There, in his own land, I will cause someone to kill him with a sword.” ’

8 At that time, the king of Assyria had left Lachish city. When the Assyrian officer heard that news, he left Jerusalem. He went to meet the king at Libnah, where the king was now fighting a battle. 9 Then the king of Assyria heard a report about Tirhakah, the king of Ethiopia. People told him, ‘He has brought his army from Ethiopia to fight against you.’

When the king of Assyria heard that news, he sent another message to Hezekiah in Jerusalem. 10 This was his message to King Hezekiah of Judah: ‘You are hoping that your God will help you. Your God may say that the king of Assyria will not destroy Jerusalem. But do not let him deceive you. 11 You have heard how the kings of Assyria have completely destroyed all other countries. So do not think that your God will rescue you. 12 The gods of those other countries did not save them. Our kings destroyed the nations of Gozan, Haran and Rezeph. They killed the people of Eden who lived in Tel Assar. 13 The kings of Hamath and Arpad have gone. The king of Sepharvaim city has gone. The kings of Hena and Ivvah have also gone.’

14 When Hezekiah received the letter with this message, he read it. Then he went up to the Lord's temple. He put the letter there, in front of the Lord. 15 Hezekiah prayed to the Lord. He said:

16 ‘Lord Almighty, you are Israel's God. You sit on your throne between the cherubs. Only you are the God who rules all the kingdoms in the world. You have made the heavens and the earth. 17 Lord, please listen carefully to me. Lord, look carefully at this letter. Listen to Sennacherib's message. He is insulting you, the God who lives for ever. 18 It is true, Lord, that the kings of Assyria have destroyed all these people and their lands. 19 They threw the gods of these nations into the fire. Those idols are not really gods. People used wood and stone to make them. So the Assyrians could destroy them. 20 So now, Lord, you are our God! Save us from the power of Sennacherib! Then all the kingdoms in the world will know that you alone are the Lord.’

God answers Hezekiah

21 Then Amoz's son, Isaiah, sent this message to Hezekiah: ‘The Lord, Israel's God, says, “You have prayed to me about Sennacherib, the king of Assyria.” 22 This is the Lord's reply. The Lord says this about King Sennacherib:

“The holy people of Zion laugh at you! They think that you are useless. Yes, the people of Jerusalem shake their heads as you run away.

23 Who do you think it is that you have insulted? Who have you shouted at? Who have you looked at so proudly? The answer is the Holy God of Israel!

24 You have sent your servants to insult the Lord God. You have said, ‘I have taken all my chariots and I have gone up high mountains, the highest mountains in Lebanon. I have cut down its tall cedar trees, and I have cut down its best pine trees. I went up to its highest places, and I went far into its forests.

25 I dug wells and they gave me water to drink. My army marched through all the rivers in Egypt, and the rivers became dry.’

26 You said that, but now listen to this! You must surely have heard it already. I decided what to do a long time ago! Now I am causing it to happen. I decided that you would destroy strong cities so that they became heaps of stones.

27 The people of those cities have no power. They are afraid and they are confused. They are like plants in a field, that cannot live for a long time. They are like fresh green grass, or grass that grows on the roof of a house. When a hot wind blows on them, it burns them and they die.

28 I know everything about you. I know where you live. I know when you go out. And I know when you return home. I know how much you shout against me, when you are angry.

29 Yes, you do shout at me! And I have heard all your proud noise. So I will put my hook in your nose. I will tie a rope to your mouth. Then I will pull you back home by the same way that you came.”

30 King Hezekiah, this is how you will know that I have spoken a true message from the Lord. This year, you will eat crops that grow by themselves. And next year you will eat what grows from the same seeds. But in the third year you will plant seeds for yourselves, and they will give you a harvest of crops. You will plant vines again and you will eat grapes from them. 31 The people who remain in Judah will be like strong plants that put their roots down into the ground. Their branches will give lots of fruit.

32 A small number of people will still be alive in Jerusalem. They will leave Mount Zion and they will go to other places. The great love that the Lord Almighty has for his people will cause that to happen!

33 This is what the Lord says about the king of Assyria: “His army will not come into this city. His soldiers will not shoot any arrows here. They will not attack the city as they hold their shields. They will not build heaps of earth against the city's walls.

34 No! The king will return home by the way that he came. He will not come into this city.” That is what the Lord says.

35 “I will make this city safe and I will rescue it. I will do that to show that I am great. I promised my servant David that I would do it. So I will do it.” ’

The Lord destroys Assyria's army

36 Then the Lord's angel went to the camp of the Assyrian army. He killed 185,000 of their soldiers. When people got up in the morning, they saw all those dead bodies! 37 So King Sennacherib of Assyria took his army away. He returned to Assyria and he lived in Nineveh.

38 One day, Sennacherib was worshipping his god Nisrok, in Nisrok's temple. Two of Sennacherib's sons, Adrammelech and Sharezer, went in and they killed him with their swords. Then they ran away to the region of Ararat. Sennacherib's son, Esarhaddon, now ruled Assyria as king. — Isaiah 37 | EasyEnglish Bible 2018 (EEB) EasyEnglish Bible © MissionAssist 2023, translated by the EasyEnglish Bible Translation Team. Cross References: Genesis 8:4; Genesis 10:11; Exodus 25:22; Leviticus 25:5; Numbers 33:20; Deuteronomy 11:10; 1 Samuel 7:8; 1 Samuel 17:46; 1 Samuel 29:6; 2 Kings 15:29; 2 Kings 18:13; 2 Kings 18:34; 2 Kings 19:1; 2 Kings 19:14,15 and 16; 2 Kings 19:21; 2 Kings 19:31; 2 Kings 19:35; 2 Kings 20:6; Job 41:2; Psalm 92:14; Isaiah 1:1; Isaiah 2:11; Isaiah 7:4; Isaiah 10:9; Isaiah 10:13; Isaiah 14:32; Isaiah 22:5; Isaiah 31:8; Isaiah 36:14-15; Matthew 10:27; Luke 19:43; Acts 2:23; Acts 7:2; Galatians 4:8

[katasterismos]

That scene where Rinaldo comes back to the camp after he’d been exiled and Goffredo hugs him is so sweet… that’s his (adopted) son!!🥹

[komsomolka]

No commentator on 7 October last year - myself included - would have predicted that the war would still be being fought with the utmost ferocity a year on. No one would have predicted a year ago that Israel would be fighting for longer than it did when it established its state in 1948. All wars Israel has fought since have been brief shows of absolute strength. [...]

Under Netanyahu’s right-wing government, the lives of the hostages were secondary to the aim of smashing Hamas. Had the hostages returned, Netanyahu could now be facing a long term in prison. But he has demonstrably failed to smash Hamas, hence the speed with which he has started a new war with Lebanon and Hezbollah. [...] Hamas re-emerges wherever Israeli troops are not. Plain clothes police officers emerge to settle disputes within a matter of hours.

At first, Israel tried to wipe out Hamas’s leadership. It has killed the first and second ranks of officials running the government, most of them in a massacre outside al-Shifa hospital.

But an insight into what is actually going on in Gaza was offered by Israel's latest announcement that it had killed three senior Hamas officials - Rawhi Mushtaha, the head of government and de facto prime minister; Sameh al-Siraj, who held the security portfolio on Hamas’s political bureau; and Sami Oudeh, commander of Hamas’s General Security Mechanism. The air strike happened three months ago, and no one had noticed their absence. This is because Hamas continued to function regardless of which leaders were alive or dead. [...]

Israel’s terror only begets more terror. The destruction of West Beirut in 1982 inspired Osama bin Laden’s attack on the Twin Towers in 2001. [...]

On 6 October, the Palestinian national cause was dead, if not buried. After more than 30 years of Oslo accords, Gaza was totally isolated. Its siege was permanent, and no one cared. Netanyahu claimed victory, in September 2023 waving a map at the UN in which the West Bank did not exist. There was only one item on the regional agenda and that was Saudi Arabia’s impending normalisation with Israel. [...]

Today, Hamas has changed the course of events, because the peaceful path to a viable Palestinian state was blocked. All talk of a peace process was a Potemkin-size mirage. Oslo not only failed to deliver a Palestinian state. It created the conditions for the Israeli state to expand and thrive as never before in the West Bank and Jerusalem. [...]

Regionally, the axis of resistance, which for much of the period since the Arab Spring, was a rhetorical device, has become a functioning military alliance. [...]

Palestine has returned to its rightful place, which is to occupy the key role in determining the stability of the region.

Israel’s brutal response to 7 October has reversed decades of Israeli and US efforts to convince Arabs that Palestine could no longer have a veto on Israeli-Arab relations. Today that veto is stronger than ever before. [...]

Of the two strategies, Sinwar’s seems to be working. Whether he lives or dies, that agenda already has an unstoppable momentum of its own. [...]

This war has stripped Israel of its liberal Zionist image, the image of the new kid on the block trying to defend itself in a “tough neighbourhood”. This has been replaced by the image of a regional ogre, a genocidal state, with no moral compass, using terror to survive. Such a state cannot live in peace with its neighbours. It crushes and dominates to survive.

Netanyahu’s war is short-term and tactical. Sinwar’s war is long-term. It is to make Israel realise it can never keep the lands it has occupied if it wants peace.

Netanyahu’s war is a year old and can only continue in the same way it started by meting out the same devastation to south Lebanon that Gaza received. It has no reverse gear. Sinwar’s war has only just started.

How Netanyahu stole defeat from the jaws of victory: Netanyahu's brutal response to 7 October has undone decades of increasingly successful efforts by Israel and the US to convince Arab governments to abandon the Palestinian national cause.

[indigogh0st]

Death of Clorinda.

I’m studying italian literature for un upcoming exam and Torquato Tasso impressed me

[sayruq]

The Jerusalem Post said the maritime corridor plan was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s idea, citing an unnamed “senior diplomatic source.” Netanyahu had reportedly first proposed the plan to Biden in October, and pressed the issue again with the US president in January.“ This source, close to the prime minister, insinuated that Biden was simply implementing a plan by Netanyahu, not actually initiating anything new,” the Post reported. While touring Gaza’s coast in a naval vessel on Sunday, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant expressed enthusiasm about the plans of a maritime corridor. “The process is designed to bring aid directly to the residents and thus continue the collapse of Hamas’s rule in Gaza,” he said.

But why would Israel, the engineer of the Gaza famine, endorse the idea of establishing a maritime corridor for aid to address a crisis it initiated and is now worsening? This might appear paradoxical if one were to assume that the primary aim of the maritime corridor is to deliver aid.Palestinians in Gaza received the news about the planned port with fear and suspicion. Analysts have speculated that this could be a ploy to eliminate Egypt as an outlet between the Gaza Strip and the rest of the world, and sever the coastal enclave’s reliance on Egypt economically and politically by way of the Egyptian-controlled Rafah crossing – the sole point of exit and entry for most people in Gaza. This would ostensibly complete Israel’s control of the Gaza Strip without dependence on Egyptian cooperation, reliable as it may have been. Abdel Bari Atwan, a Gaza-born world-renowned Palestinian journalist, invoked the US-facilitated evacuation of thousands of Palestinian guerilla fighters of the Palestine Liberation Organization from Beirut in 1982 as an insight into what these plans could possibly suggest. Palestinian fighters were transferred by US warships off the Beirut coast to Cyprus and eventually to Tunisia. Atwan indicated that the maritime corridor would create a pathway for the forcible evacuation of Palestinians by sea. Other analysts have expressed similar fears.

Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, slammed what he called “absurd” US plans for getting aid into Gaza, whether through airdrops or the temporary port. “From a humanitarian perspective, from an international perspective, from a human rights perspective, it is absurd in a dark, cynical way,” he said. Human rights groups have dismissed announcements of building a temporary pier as a distraction from Israel’s systemic and deliberate policy of starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. “The proposed maritime humanitarian corridor and temporary seaport is another tool to weaponize aid,” the Palestinian refugee advocacy group Badil said. It is meant to “absolve Israel of its responsibilities and obligations, and support Israel in its ‘day after plans’: to eliminate and replace UNRWA [the UN agency for Palestine refugees] and establish a potential mechanism for Palestinian forcible transfer out of the Gaza Strip.”

[illustratus]

La Gerusalemme liberata by Fabio Fabbi

Gerusalemme liberata, (“Jerusalem Liberated”) heroic epic poem in ottava rima, the masterpiece of Torquato Tasso. He completed it in 1575 and then spent several years revising it. While he was incarcerated in the asylum of Santa Anna, part of the poem was published without his knowledge as Il Goffredo; he published the complete epic in 1581. It was published in English as Jerusalem Delivered. Gerusalemme liberata tells of the Christian army led by Godfrey of Bouillon during the last months of the First Crusade, which recovered Jerusalem from the Turks in 1099.

[palestinegenocide]

Key Developments

Israel deploys 15,000 soldiers and military police in West Bank and Jerusalem ahead of Ramadan, including 5,000 reservists, 24 battalions, 20 Border Police companies, and two special forces units.

Hamas’s Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades spokesperson rules out any breakthrough in ceasefire talks, and describes Israel’s position as “deceptive.”

Abu Obaida warns that Israel’s campaign of starvation against Palestinians in Gaza is affecting Israeli captives, some of whom “suffer from hunger, malnutrition and dehydration.”

Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades announces names of four out of seven Israeli captives who died “due to the aggressive Israeli raids on the Gaza Strip.”

25 Palestinian children have died of malnutrition and dehydration since March. The total death toll in Gaza surpasses 31,000 people, 72 percent of whom are women and children.

Gaza City municipality says Israel destroyed a one-million-meter square of roads in the Gaza Strip. 

Gaza City municipality needs heavy vehicles and fuel supplies to clean rubble and nearly 70,000 tons of rubbish.

Rescue teams transfer 37 bodies of Palestinian martyrs and 118 injured people to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah overnight.

U.S. to send army vessel to Eastern Mediterranean to deliver aid and supplies to Gaza.

Wafa reports that Israeli bombing of tents of displaced Palestinians killed 15 people in Al-Mawasi area, west of Khan Younis.

Spain is considering recognizing a Palestinian state by 2027, according to Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.

[artthatgivesmefeelings]

Pietro Ricchi, il Lucchese (Italian, 1606-1675) The wounded Tancred, cared for by Erminia, n.d.

Tancred, a Christian warrior, lies wounded after slaying the giant Argantes. Tancred is helped by his squire and by Erminia, a Saracen princess, in love with the Christian knight. The warrior will be restored to life and eventually united with Erminia. The subject is from Tasso’s epic poem 'Jerusalem Delivered' (1581) which describes the First Crusade (1096–1099).

[druidgroves]

itch.io is doing a bundle of games for $10 in support of gaza !

"In response to the ongoing crisis in Gaza and occupied Palestine, we're creating this bundle to raise funds for the organization Medical Aid For Palestinians. From the organization's website: "MAP's vision is a future where all Palestinians can access an effective, sustainable and locally-led system of healthcare, and the full realisation of their rights to health and dignity. Through our programmes in the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and Lebanon, we work with trusted and experienced local partners to achieve this vision. Our programmes, designed and delivered by Palestinians, provide access to essential health services and build local knowledge and skills to address Palestinian health problems. In times of humanitarian emergency, we are ready to respond rapidly with aid and assistance. MAP is also committed to bearing witness to the injustices caused by occupation, displacement and conflict. We speak out in the UK and internationally, and ensure Palestinian voices are heard at the highest levels, to press for the political and social barriers to Palestinian health and dignity to be addressed." This bundle will run for two weeks, from October 26th-November 9th, 2023." (bolded emphasis mine)