The dating in the 1650s [...] is suggested by the elegant movement of the figures, captured in quick, light strokes and heightened by a play of light and shadow that moulds their delicate profiles and sets off the warm colours of their apparel. 

There is no information as to the provenance of this canvas, which was published by Camillo Manzitti¹ with a proposed dating at the end of the painter’s career that is endorsed in later studies.² 

Manzitti connects the painting with a small canvas in a private collection, which he identifies as the probable study described by Federigo Alizeri halfway through the 18th century together with three more sketches by Valerio Castello in the third drawing room on the piano nobile of Palazzo Brignole (later Palazzo Durazzo) in Piazza della Meridiana in Genoa, then the property of the Marchese Giovanni Carlo Brignole.³ While the study presents the figures in an open space, the large-format version in the Cerruti Collection focuses attention on the group of women, brought into the foreground and clustered around the child. The slight twist in the figure seen from behind recalls the invention of the shepherd in Castiglione’s Nativity of 1645, a work Castello studied and reinterpreted several times. The dating in the 1650s given above is suggested by the elegant movement of the figures, captured in quick, light strokes and heightened by a play of light and shadow that moulds their delicate profiles and sets off the warm colours of their apparel. 

The episode of Pharaoh’s daughter and her handmaidens finding the infant Moses in a basket placed by his mother among the bulrushes is addressed a number of times in the artist’s short career in a series of compositional inventions (drawings, studies and canvases)⁴ reinterpreted by his followers and direct pupils like Bartolomeo Biscaino, Stefano Magnasco and Gian Lorenzo Bertolotto.⁵ 

Gelsomina Spione

¹ Manzitti 1974, p. 235, no. 143.

² G. Zanelli, in Genoa 2008, pp. 317-318, no. 88.

³ Alizeri 1846-47, vol. II, part I, p. 367.

⁴ Orlando 2001, pp. 32-37.

⁵ Manzitti 2004, p. 190.