Chaos. The Genesis

Chaos: The Genesis, painted in 1841 and held at the Armenian monastery of San Lazzaro degli Armeni in Venice, is one of Aivazovsky's most philosophically ambitious early works. The subject — the primordial chaos preceding divine creation as described in Genesis — allowed him to paint water and light stripped of any navigational, historical, or meteorological context: pure elemental form before the existence of landscape, weather, or human presence. The Armenian monastery connection is significant: Aivazovsky was of Armenian descent, and the Mekhitarist congregation at San Lazzaro had been a center of Armenian cultural and intellectual life since the eighteenth century. Donating or selling a major work to this institution was a gesture of cultural solidarity with his ancestral community. The work dates to his Italian period, when exposure to Turner's work — which pursued similar themes of light, atmosphere, and elemental force — may have encouraged his most experimental ambitions.

Without the structural elements of horizon, coastline, or vessel, Aivazovsky organizes the composition around the interplay of light and turbulent water alone. The Genesis theme demanded a representation of divine light emerging from or shining through formless watery chaos, challenging him to make light itself the protagonist. He uses swirling paint application for the water and radiating zones of brightness for the divine light source.