Moses

Lorenzo Monaco's Moses, painted around 1408 as part of a larger Old Testament cycle at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shows the prophet as a solemn, frontal figure in the hieratic tradition of Byzantine and Trecento panel painting. The gold ground, the precisely articulated drapery folds, and the figure's elongated elegance are characteristic of the International Gothic style that Lorenzo Monaco developed in Florence at the turn of the fifteenth century. As a Camaldolese monk, he painted these Old Testament figures as part of the theological program of biblical typology, in which the figures of the Hebrew scriptures prefigure the events of the New Testament.

The patriarch is rendered with characteristic flowing robes and expressive gesture, painted in Lorenzo Monaco's luminous tempera palette with the gold ground and careful figure modeling that define his contribution to early Quattrocento Florentine painting.