The Sacrifice of Noah

Genesis tells how Noah, once out of the ark, offered clean animals and birds on an altar, and how God set a rainbow in the clouds as a promise that no flood would destroy the earth again. In the far distance Noah kneels by a blazing altar, a figure of God flies through the sky in a beam of light, and a pale rainbow arcs over the hills near the stranded ark. The foreground belongs to the farmyard, and one of its birds could never have met Noah. The turkey came from the Americas. Spanish ships brought it to Europe earlier in the 16th century, and by the time the workshop of Jacopo Bassano produced this canvas, late in that century, it was being raised on European farms. Today the picture is on loan to Palazzo Chigi, the offices of the Italian prime minister, so it is not on view at the Galleria Borghese.