Landschaft mit der Auffindung des Moses

In the late 1630s Philip IV of Spain was filling his new pleasure palace outside Madrid, the Buen Retiro, and he sent to Rome for landscapes. Claude Lorrain, a Frenchman who had made himself the most sought-after landscape painter in Italy, supplied several, this one around 1639. The title promises the finding of Moses, the baby drawn from the Nile by Pharaoh's daughter, but you have to hunt for them. The real subject is the light and the land: a broad river valley, trees framing the view, a bridge, and the sun low over distant water. The biblical figures are small players at the foot of a world that dwarfs them. The buildings on the right vaguely recall the edge of Rome, where Claude actually worked, rather than Egypt at all.