Abraham Sacrificing His Son Isaac

In Genesis, God tells Abraham to take his only son Isaac up a mountain and offer him as a burnt sacrifice. Abraham obeys. He lays the firewood on the boy, carries the fire and the knife himself and binds Isaac on the altar, and only at the last moment does an angel stop his hand, so that a ram caught in a thicket is offered instead. Pittoni painted the story in Venice in the first half of the 1750s and arranged every part of it around Abraham, a massive figure who fills the middle of the canvas. Look around him and the pieces are all there, the pile of wood, a pot of fire, the clothes Isaac has taken off and left on the ground, and the ram. The museum points to the clear, bright colour and the fluttering drapery as what Pittoni shared with two Venetian contemporaries, Sebastiano Ricci and Giambattista Tiepolo. The canvas was in a private collection in Venice until 1967, when the London dealers Agnew's sold it to the Museum of Fine Arts.