Joseph interpreting Pharoah's Dream

Lazzaro Bastiani's Joseph Interpreting Pharaoh's Dream, painted around 1485 and formerly in the Cook collection, depicts the Old Testament episode in which the imprisoned Hebrew Joseph — gifted with prophetic vision — interprets Pharaoh's dream of seven fat and seven lean cattle as foretelling seven years of abundance followed by seven years of famine. This subject, drawn from Genesis, was a popular choice for cassone decorative painting and secular narrative panels in fifteenth-century Italian patrician culture, where Old Testament figures of prudence and providential wisdom were celebrated as models of virtuous leadership. Bastiani was a Venetian painter who worked in the generation of Bellini, absorbing the warm luminosity of Venetian colorism into a solid, narrative-focused pictorial style. The subject offered painters the opportunity to represent the opulent setting of an Egyptian court alongside the Jewish protagonist's gift of interpretation.

Bastiani organizes the scene around the confrontation between Pharaoh enthroned and the interpreting Joseph, rendering the Egyptian court setting with decorative richness and the narrative gesture of explanation with expressive clarity. The warm Venetian palette and confident figure handling reflect Bastiani's position within the mature fifteenth-century Venetian tradition.