The Trials of Moses

This wall tells the early life of Moses in seven episodes, and it reads from right to left. On the right, in a yellow robe, Moses kills an Egyptian he has seen beating a Hebrew, and then flees into the desert. In the middle, at a well, he drives off shepherds who are keeping the daughters of Jethro, a priest of Midian, away from the water, and then draws water for their sheep himself. High on the left he takes off his shoes before the burning bush, and below he leads his people out of Egypt.

Botticelli painted it in 1481 and 1482, and across the chapel his Temptations of Christ faces it, the trials of Christ answering the trials of Moses.

More than four centuries later the two sisters at the well found an unexpected admirer. In Swann's Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, the elegant Charles Swann is struck by how much Odette, the woman he is courting, looks like one of them, Zipporah, who would become Moses' wife. He keeps a reproduction of the figure on his writing table in place of a photograph of Odette, and the likeness makes her more precious to him.