Moses Striking Water from the Rock

Two names stand on this canvas in the museum's record. The figures are Sebastiano Ricci's, and the landscape is attributed to his nephew Marco, a landscape painter who also designed scenery for the theatre. Filippo Juvarra, the architect who directed the building works of the Savoy court, engaged Marco for decorations at the castle of Rivoli outside Turin, and it was through Juvarra that King Victor Amadeus II ordered large canvases from Sebastiano around 1725. The museum dates this one to about 1725 to 1726.

The story is from Exodus. In the desert the Israelites run out of water and turn on Moses, and at God's command he strikes a rock with his staff and water flows out for the whole people. The museum calls the result choral and spectacular, a crowd scene more than four metres wide. Its pendant, Daniel clearing Susanna of a false charge, is the same size and hangs in the same room.