(Antwerp? circa 1540–1596 Venice)
The Finding of Moses,
oil on canvas, 93.5 x 131.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, Italy;
where acquired by the present owner

Exhibited:
Venice, Palazzo Ducale, Venezia e l’Egitto, 1 October 2011 – 21 January 2012

We are grateful to Bernard Aikema for confirming the attribution of the present painting after examination in the original.

The harmonious balance between the figures and the landscape in the present composition suggests a dating around 1585 to 1589 for this work. During this period the artist executed the cycle of Amori now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

The scene represented here is The Finding of Moses: the infant was the son of Amram and Jochebed, his mother who hid him, at the age of three months, in a basket of rushes on the shores of the Nile in order to save him from the persecution of the Pharaoh. Moses was found on the waters of the Nile by the sovereign’s daughter who decided to adopt him as her own son. Paolo Fiammingo sets the scene in a landscape with Egyptian connotations including a palm tree, in the shade of which is a sculpted personification of the Nile and what may be the first representation of pyramids in Venetian Cinquecento painting. The artist eliminates the numerous maids who usually accompany the Pharaoh’s daughter in paintings of this subject, and he limits the number of figures to three making the composition easily interpretable as well as conferring greater visibility and importance to the landscape setting that was his artistic specialisation. The figures are dressed in late sixteenth century dress, which along with the hamlet that can be seen at the foot of the pyramids, makes this painting an example of the fusion of northern and exotic elements.

Pauwels Franck, known in Italy as Paolo Fiammingo, is thought to have been a native of Antwerp born around 1540. Following a period in Florence where he may have been involved in the decoration of the Studiolo of Francesco I in the Palazzo Vecchio, he moved to Venice during the 1570s where he was able to establish himself within the highly competitive Venetian art world. His Saint Jerome in the church in Mirano dates to about 1578 and at almost exactly this time he began collaborating with Jacopo Tintoretto on the landscape passages in the painting of Saint Roche in the Desert for church of San Rocco. Subsequently this collaboration with Tintoretto led him to supply landscapes for many of the celebrated master’s paintings, allowing him to assert himself in this field. 1580 marks the year in which the long rapport with his greatest patron, Hans Fugger, began with the commission of a cycle of paintings representing the Triumph of the Elements for his residence in Kirchheim in Bavaria. This was not the only cycle Paolo Fiammingo executed; over the course of the next two decades the artist was to have occasion to express himself freely, according to his own inclinations, within the domain of landscape painting. The artist’s interest in natural scenery became increasingly important in his paintings, to the extent that by the end of his career Paolo Fiammingo was making almost pure landscapes in which figures only appeared as an expression of nature itself.