Les Animaux entrant dans l'Arche de Noé

Les Animaux entrant dans l'Arche de Noé — Animals Entering Noah's Ark — was one of the defining subjects of Baroque painting in the Flemish and Italian traditions. Castiglione's version, now at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille, belongs to the Genoese and Roman phase of his career when contact with Flemish merchant collectors introduced him to the animal-painting tradition of Jan Brueghel. The two-by-two procession was irresistible to any painter trained in natural observation: it required detailed rendering of a wide range of species moving across a landscape under gathering storm clouds. Marseille's museum, with its strong holdings in Flemish and Italian Baroque work reflecting the port city's Mediterranean trade connections, is a fitting home for a canvas that is itself about the movement of living things across boundaries of water and land.

Canvas; Castiglione works with his characteristic energetic, open brushwork in the landscape zones, reserving tighter control for the animal forms whose identifiability is part of the picture's appeal. The palette shifts from warm browns and tans in the foreground to cool, overcast grey-blues at the horizon under the pre-flood sky.