Scourge of the Serpents

This is a painting built for one particular wall. It stretches almost 14 metres from side to side but stands under two metres high, a long horizontal band, because Giambattista Tiepolo made it to fill the space beneath the raised choir of the church of Santi Cosma e Damiano in Venice, where cloistered nuns followed the Mass from behind a grille. He was about 36 when he took it on, early in a career that would later carry him across Europe. The scene comes from the Book of Numbers: the Israelites, wandering and faithless in the desert, are punished with a plague of venomous snakes, and Moses lifts a bronze serpent on a pole so that anyone who looks at it is healed. Tiepolo spreads the writhing bodies right across that great width. What hangs in the Accademia today is only a fragment of a larger canvas that was later cut down, and it returned to view in 2021 after about a year of restoration.