The Israelites Drinking the Miraculous Water

The Israelites Drinking the Miraculous Water from the Rock — the episode from Exodus 17 in which Moses struck a rock at Horeb to produce water for the thirsting Israelites — gave Jacopo Bassano material perfectly suited to his compositional strengths. The scene demanded a large, crowded figure group in a landscape setting, with animals drinking alongside humans and the physical drama of water gushing from stone providing a focal event. Bassano's pastoral and pastoral-narrative canvases consistently show his investment in making Old Testament episodes feel as immediate and physically convincing as the rural Venetian world he knew firsthand. The undated canvas at New College Oxford represents one of several Bassano works in Oxford college collections, reflecting the collecting habits of educated English gentlemen who traveled to Italy on the Grand Tour and brought back Italian paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The subject also carried typological significance in Christian reading — the water from the rock as a prefiguration of Christ as the source of living water — giving the image devotional as well as narrative purpose.

Oil on canvas, the composition requires an expansive crowd scene with multiple levels of engagement — the central action of Moses and the rock, the pressing crowd of Israelites, and the animals drinking in the foreground. Bassano's handling of such crowd scenes employs differentiated brushwork — more deliberate for foreground figures, increasingly summary for those receding into the middle and far distance. Warm, dusty palette appropriate to a desert episode.