Moses Saved from the Waters

Three and a half metres of canvas for a story that takes a few lines of Exodus. At one end the infant Moses is lifted out of the river and shown to Pharaoh's daughter. The rest is a party, with musicians, couples, drinking and a hunt off in the distance, all of it described with an almost Flemish attention to hats and dogs. That is Venetian painting of the early 1540s, when patrician families were building villas on the mainland and liked their sacred stories set in the kind of afternoon they enjoyed themselves.

Who actually painted it has never been settled. Luigi Lanzi's history of Italian painting, in its 1825 edition, called it a Giorgione. It has long been catalogued under Bonifacio de' Pitati, and in 1963 Giorgio Faggin argued for his pupil Domenico Biondo, finding the colour too cool and the mood too light for the master. The canvas reached Milan in Cardinal Cesare Monti's bequest of 1650.