Moses saved from the waters

In 1651 Velázquez was in Venice buying paintings for Felipe IV, and this long, low canvas came back to Madrid among them. The Prado dates it to around 1555. In the royal Alcázar it went into the vaulted rooms below the main floor, the ones known as the vaults of Titian, and the inventory of 1700 records it there with the six other canvases it had travelled with, in a chamber the clerks called the room of the Nile. What it shows is Moses being lifted out of the Nile. The Alcázar burned down in 1734. The next inventory that names the painting is from 1746, by which time it was at La Granja in the hills above Segovia, in the collection of Isabel de Farnesio, second wife of Felipe V, who kept hundreds of pictures there.