The Finding of Moses
Artist: Paolo Veronese (Venetian, 1528-1588)
Date: c. 1581-1582
Medium: Oil on canvas
Collection: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, United States
Description
The subject is taken from Exodus 2:3–10. According to the biblical account, the infant Moses was placed by his mother in a basket and hidden beside the river to escape the edict of the king of Egypt that all the male offspring of the Israelites should be slain at birth. The basket was discovered by the king’s daughter when she came to the river to bathe with her maidservants. Seeing the princess take pity on the child, Moses’s sister Miriam, who had been keeping watch from a distance, approached and offered to find a nurse for him; in this way, Moses was saved and brought up by his own mother.
Veronese imagined the event in contemporary terms and showed the princess wearing a magnificent robe of gold and silver brocade and copious jewelry, surrounded by a courtly entourage that includes a dwarf. In the immediate foreground, an African servant holds the now-empty basket. The kneeling woman holding the baby is presumably Miriam, and the older woman preparing to wrap him in a cloth is his mother. In the left middle ground, two other servants, apparently unaware of the remarkable discovery, have undressed to their shifts and are preparing to bathe in the river. Although in Christian tradition Moses was often interpreted as a prototype for Christ, Veronese did not seem to be concerned here with the possible theological, political, or moral implications of the story, but treated it, as observed by Kurt Badt, simply as a poetic idyll.
