The Israelites gathering Water from the Rock

This painting belongs to a group of works which emanated from the successful Bassano studio. The prime was the picture executed by Jacopo and his son Francesco, now in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden, dated 1572-1573. Francesco executed another painted version (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), as well as an associated drawing for the motif of the old man of horseback being offered water by a young man (Florence, Uffizi). It is to this later Vienna version by Francesco that the present painting, by his younger brother Leandro, relates most closely. Dr. Nodari dates it to the second half of the 1580s, when both Leandro and Francesco were active in Venice. She suggests that a drawing in the Galleria Estense in Modena (inventory no. 1176) of a man in a turban kneeling could have been executed by Leandro as an aid when copying his brother's composition.