Building the Ark

Francesco Bassano the Younger's Building the Ark, held at the Hepworth Wakefield, draws on the Genesis narrative of Noah to create a subject perfectly suited to the Bassano workshop's specialities: large teams of workers, varied animals, complex construction activities, and the tension between human labour and divine command. The construction of the Ark — the preliminary phase before the Entry of the Animals and the Flood — offered opportunities to depict carpentry, timber working, the organisation of a vast project, and the mundane activities of ordinary people going about extraordinary work. This combination of the heroic biblical narrative with the genre detail of working life was exactly what made the Bassano workshop distinctive and commercially successful. The Hepworth Wakefield holds a group of Bassano works likely acquired through the networks of British collecting that brought many Venetian paintings to England.

The construction scene composition organises workers at different tasks across multiple spatial planes — some felling timber, others fitting planks, others working at height on the growing structure — creating the visual complexity of a large collaborative project. The Ark's growing form provides the dominant structural element against which human figures are arranged.