Moses verteidigt die Töchter Jitros

By 1523 the calm balance of the High Renaissance was starting to crack in Florence, and Rosso Fiorentino was one of the young painters pulling it apart. He takes a quiet Bible episode — Moses driving off shepherds who bothered the daughters of Jethro at a well — and turns it into a knot of naked, straining bodies piled almost flat against the picture. The limbs echo Michelangelo's lost battle drawings, pushed into something harsher and more crowded. Moses appears twice, fighting in front and then running toward Zipporah, the woman he would marry. The painting later left Italy as a gift to King Francis I of France before finding its way back to Florence.