Moses Saved from the Waters

The shape tells you what this panel was for. It is 113 centimetres wide and barely 31 high, the proportion of a piece of furniture, and around 1540 a Venetian household would have had a picture like this set into panelling or into the front of a chest. Bonifazio staged the rescue of the infant Moses from the Nile as something a Venetian patron would recognise: Pharaoh's daughter out in the open with her women, horses and a dog, servants carrying bottles and glasses, a lute and a viola being played, the river running back into hills and houses. The name on the label kept changing. The 1675 inventory drawn up when Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici died called it a Paolo Veronese. The 19th-century gallery catalogues gave it to Giorgione. Giovanni Morelli, the Italian critic who built attributions out of small repeated habits of drawing, assigned it to Bonifazio de' Pitati, and that is the name it carries now in the Palatine Gallery under inventory number Palatina 161.