Noah’s Flood

This is a scene of desperation, of people and animals trying to save themselves. But they are all doomed. The ark is hardly visible mid-right in the stormy gloom (all the gloomier because the painting has darkened and degraded over time). A horseman is galloping towards it, but he’s not Noah. It is possible that the man emerging from the house is our hero, but his family and the pairs of animals are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps the Lord has already shut them in.

Like William de Brailes’s miniature painting of 1250, this is about the horror of the flood itself.

In the 1560s, Jacopo Bassano (c.1510–92) began to paint more and more Old Testament subjects under the influence of Reformation ideas. For, a huge change was taking place in the religious practices of Europe as lay people challenged the authority of the Roman Church and demanded to have access to the New Testament, and especially the Old Testament, in a language that they could understand, rather than Latin, known mainly by the clergy.

The Catholic Church’s reaction to this revolt was the Council of Trent (1545–63) and one of the ideas it emphasized was that Noah was the saviour of humanity, a precursor of Jesus Christ. But there may have been another reason for the subject’s popularity. Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), the famous, openly gay playwright and erotic poet, translated Genesis into Italian (published Venice, 1538), adding embellishments from his own imagination, with a particularly dramatic evocation of the Flood.

Jacopo Bassano liked to fill his foregrounds with rustic life and animals, tucking away the actual subject of the painting in the background. Here, he adapted this formula to the story of the Flood, and the action and drama are remarkably close to Aretino’s description of the scene. Jacopo may also have been aware of the great flood of 1560, when the river running through Feltre, less than a day’s ride from Bassano, broke its banks with great loss of life.

Jacopo and his workshop painted the story of Noah’s Flood repeatedly from the 1570s onwards. Indeed, they produced more of their four-part Flood series than any other Old Testament scene. This version is from a series commissioned by Guglielmo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, then sold to King Charles I of England (1600–49), which is how it comes to be in the Royal Collections today.

References

Aikema, Bernard. 1996. Jacopo Bassano and his Public Moralizing Pictures in an Age of Reform ca.1535–1600 (Princeton: Princeton University Press)

Aretino, Pietro. 1538. Il Genesi di M. Pietro Aretino con la Visione di Noè ne la quale vede i misterii del Testamento Vecchio e del Nuovo, diviso in Tre Parti (Venice: Francesco Marcolini), available at https://books.google.it/books?id=KONfAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb&#v=onepage&q&f=false

Brown, Beverley Louise and Marini Paola (eds). 1993. Jacopo Bassano c.1510–1592 (Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum)

The animals went in two by two, hurrah, hurrah

The elephant and the kangaroo, hurrah, hurrah…

…and, as we know, jolly old Noah saves all the species from the flood with his ark.

Actually, there was nothing jolly about it at all. It was terrifying, with God so disappointed by humanity’s behaviour that He decided to destroy His own creation.

This is how the thirteenth-century English miniature painter William de Brailes imagined the devastation. The animals are innocent but they have died too because, as the fourth-century theologian John Chrysostom explains—following the Jewish commentators—they were created for humankind’s sake; therefore, it is right that they too should meet their end. God has broken the dome that according to medieval cosmology was the sky, separating the waters ‘above the firmament’ from the waters below, so the ocean above is pouring down in five cataracts.

In the Middle Ages, artists nearly always followed established prototypes, rarely deviating from them much or painting from reality. Here we have an extraordinarily original full-page painting, about the size of a paperback, with an underwater view of the Flood. The remarkable detail is the way in which the human bodies are floating on their fronts with their arms hanging down; de Brailes must have seen this in real life because that is how a corpse actually floats under water. We know that he was a bit of an individualist because he signed his work twice at a time when most artists remained anonymous, and his spirited scenes often break through the margins of his pictures.

He lived in Oxford, when the university was growing fast. The increasing numbers of religious scholars—combined with the Church’s new emphasis on personal devotion—led to demand for smaller prayer books for private clients. It was the age of the psalter, a prayer book with a selection of psalms prayed eight times a day, often preceded by pages illustrating stories from the Bible. This is one of 24 leaves in Baltimore, from a psalter now in the Stockholm National Museum [Ms. B.2010]. There are seven more leaves in Paris, and there may originally have been as many as 98.

With its piled up dead bodies this image was intended to shock, displaying the effects of humankind’s sinfulness, before the reader turned the page and saw the ark in which God decided to give creation another chance.

References

De Hamel, Christopher. 2001. The Book: A History of the Bible (New York: Phaidon)

Hill, Robert C. (trans.). 1990. John Chrysostom Homilies on Genesis 25:18–45, Fathers of the Church 82 (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press)

Kauffman C.M. 2003. Biblical Imagery in Medieval England 700–1500 (London: Harvey Miller)

Make yourself an ark of gopher wood; make rooms in the ark and cover it inside and out with pitch.… Make a roof for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above; and set the door of the ark in its side; make it with lower, second, and third decks. (Genesis 6:14, 16)

This woodcut does not pay as much attention to the Lord’s building instructions as modern biblical literalists do. Yes, the ark has three floors, but it is a standard cog such as sailed the North Sea throughout the Middle Ages, not a massive ship 525 feet (160m) long, which is what you get if you multiply the length of the Egyptian cubit, 21 inches (53cm), by 300.

This image is one of 1,809 produced by Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff for the Schedelsche Weltchronik (world chronicle), published in Nürnberg in 1493.

Noah, dressed as a rich Nürnberg merchant of the day, is directing the work, with craftsmen who presumably do not know that they are about to perish. The superstructure is helpfully labelled. The central roof space is the living quarters for Noah and his family, with the animals on either side. The window in the middle of the next deck is the ‘Stercoraria’, for shovelling out manure, etc. The herbal and animal-parts apothecaries on either side were probably stipulated by the chronicle’s author, Hartmann Schedel, who was a doctor of medicine.

This is not so much a religious image as an illustration—within a history of the world—of a story so familiar and domesticated that the artist could depict it as a contemporary boatyard, as much about carpentry as the Bible story. He hints at the rest of the story by depicting the dove with the twig in its beak, which is arriving prematurely top right.

The image comes out of the same cultural stable as late medieval satirical but moralizing plays based on stories from the Old and New Testament, with stock characters such as Noah’s wilful wife, who refuses to get into the ark because she prefers to drink with her girl friends. Needless to say, the menfolk prevail; Noah’s sons drag her into the ark and the gossips all drown.

References

Füssel, Stephan (ed.). 2001. Schedelsche Weltchronik (Cologne: Taschen)

Pollard, Alfred. 1909. English Miracle Plays, Moralities, and Interludes (Oxford: OUP)