The Israelites gathering Manna

The Israelites Gathering Manna, in the National Gallery London, depicts the miraculous episode from Exodus in which the starving Israelites in the desert receive the heavenly bread—a subject that traditionally prefigures the Eucharist and was often placed alongside scenes of the Last Supper. Ercole de' Roberti's treatment, painted around 1490, compresses the scene's physical activity—figures bending, gathering, and carrying the fallen manna—into a composition of tense, angular energy that is characteristic of his approach to narrative subjects.

The composition is crowded with figures in varied postures of bending, crouching, and reaching, each described with Roberti's precise linear definition. The landscape recession is managed through scale diminution of the background figures rather than elaborate spatial perspective, concentrating pictorial energy on the foreground gathering activity.