Moisés e sua esposa etíope Zípora

By 1650 Rubens had been dead a decade, and Jacob Jordaens had become the busiest painter in Antwerp, a port grown rich on trade that reached far beyond Europe. Here he takes a line from the Book of Numbers, where Moses is criticised for marrying a Cushite, an African woman, and turns it into a close double portrait. Moses rests one hand on the stone tablets of the law and gestures with the other toward his wife Zipporah. What is unusual for the period is how she is painted. She is not a type or a servant set in the background but a person, met at eye level, with her own steady expression. Very few painters of the century approached the subject this way, and Jordaens came back to it more than once.