Moses Saved from the Waters

Exodus tells how Pharaoh ordered every newborn Hebrew boy to be thrown into the Nile, and how one mother hid her son in a basket among the reeds, where Pharaoh's daughter found him when she came down to bathe. Niccolò dell'Abbate tells the story with no Egypt in it at all. The princess and her women wear loose antique drapery, and one bends over the baby in his basket. Behind them, though, the river winds past a northern town with a Gothic spire, runs under a stone bridge and carries swimmers, all under a heavy sky.

The Louvre dates the canvas only to the third quarter of the 16th century, the years when he was working in France. The museum has lent it more than once to exhibitions about landscape painting, to Taipei in 1995 and to Seoul in 2006. It came to the Louvre in 1935 as a gift from the collector Jean Schmit.