The Animals Going Toward the Ark

Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione's dazzlingly energetic style is superbly suited to this stampede to the ark, a subject he liked because he loved drawing animals. In Baroque fashion, the composition is lopsided, with the figures compressed at one end and Noah, faintly sketched and expectant, at the other. On the way to the ark, a goat pauses to relieve itself, a reference perhaps to the coming flood that will cleanse the earth (Genesis 6-9).