A wide band of fine parallel lines arches across the sky from the cloud on the left.
Bible in art · Genesis
God Enters into a Covenant with Noah (from "Liber Genesis")
Crispijn de Passe the Elder · 1612
The Met, New York
Crispijn de Passe the Elder, an engraver and publisher in Utrecht, made this plate for "Liber Genesis", a book of Genesis pictures with Latin verses printed in 1612. The whole scene is under 13 cm wide; it is shown here without its two lines of verse.
Noah and his family kneel on a hillside after leaving the ark. Smoke still rises from their altar on the left, a wide rainbow spans the sky, and the animals they kept alive graze again in the valley.
From the text
- Noah’s altar and burnt offerings after the flood (Genesis 8:20)
- The rainbow set in the clouds as the sign of the covenant (Genesis 9:13)
- A covenant with every living creature, not only with people (Genesis 9:12)
The artist’s own
- Noah’s wife and family, unnamed in these verses, kneeling around him in prayer
- Beams of light breaking from the cloud
- A green valley with cattle, deer and sheep, like the countryside of the Low Countries
- Birds flying high under the arc
Details
The rainbow
Noah
An old bearded man kneels with his hands raised, looking up.
Hands joined
A hooded woman kneels beside him, her hands pressed together.
The altar
On the left a thick column of smoke rises from a fire on a stone altar.
Light
Rays stream down from the edge of the cloud.
Animals again
Cattle, deer and sheep graze in the valley below the mountains.
Crispijn de Passe the Elder, Netherlandish, Arnemuiden 1564–1637 Utrecht. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Bequest of Phyllis Massar, 2011; acc. 2012.136.714.8) · Engraving · Public Domain — The Met Open Access (CC0). The Met Collection API record: "isPublicDomain": true; The Met marks such works on its website "with the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) icon".