A Descida de Noé do Ararate

Aivazovsky made his name painting the sea, but he was born Hovhannes Aivazian, an Armenian, and in the late 1880s, in his early 70s, he turned to the mountain that stands at the heart of his people's story. Ararat is where the Book of Genesis has Noah's ark come to rest, and where Armenians have long placed the beginning of the world after the flood. He shows the family and the animals coming down the slope into an empty, freshly washed land. The picture was first exhibited in Paris. It reached Yerevan later through the efforts of the Armenian painter Martiros Saryan, and it hangs today in the National Gallery of Armenia, within sight on a clear day of Ararat itself, across the modern border in Turkey.