Focus on this artwork and explore the Description and style.
The painting represents the biblical episode of Exodus (I, 16–22), when the seven daughters of Jethro, a priest of the land of Midian, were harassed by a group of Midianite shepherds as they draw water from a well to water their father's flock. The shepherds wanted to take advantage of the efforts of the young women to give their animals to drink, but the threatening intervention of the young Moses, sitting nearby, made them quit. As a reward, Moses was given one of the girls as his wife, Zipporah.The life story of Moses was popular in the humanistic circles of Florence because of the "Life of Moses", written by the Jewish author Philo in the 1st century. Rosso had to know the text, retaining its moralizing and philosophical connotation.The work does have a very original compositional system, in which the prophet has a fully active and violent role in driving away the shepherds. In fact, Moses appears furious and half-naked in the center of the composition, while raging on the bodies of his rivals. According to Mugnaini (1994), the painting would have included two other events of the life of the young Moses, namely the killing of an Egyptian who had attacked a Jewish (ES I, 11–12) and when he intervene to stop a fight between two Jews (ES I, 13–15).The foreground is a tangle of boldly foreshortened naked bodies, in which the pained grimace of the man on the right stands out, or the anger of the man who is rushing to the left with a veil blown by the wind around his body, a quote of classical art. Probably it is Moses himself, again, who would approach Sephora (with her breasts uncovered and the wet-effect dress that adheres to her skin) announcing the expulsion of the shepherds, while other women run away ignoring what has happened. Nearby there can be seen the sheep and the edge of the well, reachable by a few steps. At the top right, in front of a strip of sky, stands a row of houses. The reclining figure in the foreground, with the violent foreshortening, will be an important source of inspiration for the Florentine Mannerists, such as Bronzino.
The scene is essentially tripartite on three levels, but the complexity of the articulation binds the plans with continuous references, subverting the traditional Renaissance balances. Complementary colors are often juxtaposed and the geometric shapes used in the pictorial surfaces are varied: this contributes to canceling the sense of spatial depth and plasticity of the volumes, in a decidedly anticlassical direction.In the painting, however, there is the presence of different artists that aren't the original artist himself, perhaps they were necessary to complete unfinished areas, or perhaps they make this a copy of a lost original by Rosso.
Florence Jethro Renaissance Moses Philo Exodus Zipporah Midian Bronzino