Moses and the Brazen Serpent by Corrado Giaquinto

Moses and the Brazen Serpent c. 1743 - 1744

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drawing, tempera

drawing

baroque

tempera

history-painting

Dimensions: 12 15/16 x 17 5/8 in. (32.86 x 44.77 cm) (image)14 7/16 x 20 3/16 in. (36.67 x 51.28 cm) (sheet, irregular)

Corrado Giaquinto made this drawing, ‘Moses and the Brazen Serpent,’ using pen and brown ink with brown wash, during the 1700s in Italy. Giaquinto was court painter to Philip V of Spain and director of the Academy of Saint Luke in Rome. The drawing depicts a scene from the Book of Numbers in which God sends venomous snakes to punish the Israelites for speaking against him and Moses. As people die from snake bites, Moses prays to God for forgiveness. God instructs Moses to erect a bronze serpent on a pole, so that anyone who looks at it will be healed. Here, the foreground is filled with writhing figures. It gives us a sense of the embodied, visceral experience of suffering and salvation. But notice how, in the center, some figures turn towards the serpent on the pole, while others remain in anguish. Giaquinto seems to suggest that faith is a choice amid suffering. The drawing is less about the miraculous and more about the individuals' emotional responses to crisis.

Comments

minneapolisinstituteofart over 1 year ago

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Corrado Giaquinto's Moses and the Brazen Serpent is a lively compositional study and may relate to a fresco by the artist in the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome, one of Giaquinto's most important Roman commissions. Fresco is a highly demanding medium, as changes cannot easily be made to the painting once the day's work in plaster has dried. Thus artists had to prepare their compositions extensively before they began painting, working out every detail of the work on paper. If this drawing relates to the Santa Croce in Gerusalemme project, Giaquinto changed the composition and format considerably before executing the final fresco and the better preserved modello for the painting illustrated here.