The Gathering of Manna

The Gathering of Manna, painted around 1733 and now at the Ashmolean Museum Oxford, depicts the Old Testament miracle where God provided bread from heaven to sustain the Israelites during their forty years in the desert. The subject was particularly popular in refectory decoration — the miraculous feeding of the Israelites paralleling the communal meal of monks or canons — and Tiepolo's treatment of the crowd gathering manna beneath a radiant sky creates an image of divine generosity appropriate to any dining space. The Ashmolean's Venetian holdings, assembled through Oxford's scholarly engagement with Italian art history, include this as one of its primary examples of Tiepolo's early mature religious painting. The work dates from the same year as several major fresco commissions that were establishing his European reputation.

Executed with luminous palette and attention to airy compositions, the work reveals Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's characteristic approach to composition and surface. The treatment of light and the careful modulation of color create visual richness within a unified pictorial scheme.