Moses

Moses stands half-length out of the dark, holding the rod with which, in the Bible, he parted the Red Sea and struck water from a rock, and pointing it at the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. Valentin painted him in Rome around 1628, near the end of his career, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum counts it among his late works, sombre in tone in the manner of Caravaggio. Its first known owner was another painter. Nicolas Régnier, born in Maubeuge in what is now northern France, had worked in the same circle of Caravaggio's followers in Rome before settling in Venice in the mid-1620s, where he painted, dealt in pictures and gathered a collection of his own. From Régnier the Moses passed to the Marquis of Hamilton in Britain and then to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, whose paintings still form the core of the Vienna gallery.