Die eherne Schlange

Fyodor Bruni spent close to 15 years on this single canvas, beginning in Rome in 1827 and finishing it in 1841. It is enormous, over five metres tall and eight across, still the largest painting in the Russian Museum. The scene comes from the Book of Numbers: the Israelites, worn down by years of wandering the desert after leaving Egypt, turn against Moses, and God sends a plague of venomous snakes among them. In the painting the dead and dying are strewn across the foreground in tangled heaps, while in the distance Moses raises the bronze serpent that will heal anyone who looks up at it. Almost no one in the panicking crowd is looking. Tsar Nicholas I bought the finished work and made Bruni a knight of a Russian order.