Lot and his daughters (Genesis 19:30-38)

Antwerp printed and sold engravings all over Europe, and the engraver's working material was a plate of copper. Painters in the city took the same plates as a support, because paint sits on polished metal without sinking in and the colours keep a hard shine. This scene is on one of them, 68 by 86 centimetres. It belongs to a run of Genesis subjects the Prado catalogues as a single series, with Cain killing Abel, Noah loading the ark and Jacob's ladder among them. The story follows the destruction of Sodom. Lot and his two daughters are living in a cave, the daughters believe no men are left anywhere, and on two nights they give their father wine and lie with him. The Moabites and the Ammonites descend from those nights. The Spanish title names the drink rather than the daughters. The series came to the museum in 1931 with the bequest of the Madrid collector Pedro Fernández Durán, which brought in more than 3,000 items at once.