THE ‘DRUNKENNESS OF NOAH’ AT THE CORRER MUSEUM: GIOVANNI BELLINI’S MASTERPIECE REMAINS ON SHOW UNTIL MID JUNE!

It will be possible to visit Giovanni Bellini’s masterpiece ‘The Drunkenness of Noah’ in the Sala delle Quattro Porte at the Correr Museum in St Mark’s Square until 18 June 2016. The Drunkenness of Noah is taken from Genesis (9:18-27) and evokes the episode in which Noah, drunk after drinking lots of good wine from his vineyard, fell asleep naked. His son Cam finds him half asleep, laughs at seeing what the Greeks called his ‘private parts’ and calls his brothers, who on arriving want to cover their elderly father. Noah will curse Cam for his disrespectful mockery and condemn him and the descendants of his son Canaan to slavery. This family drama was interpreted by exegetes as the restoration of a hierarchical order among the survivors of the purifying flood, cause and justification of the future inequality between men descended from the three brothers. This beautiful, intense work is on show at the Correr thanks to the generous partner the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie of Besançon, which has had the work in its collections since 1895. It was probably the last painted by the elderly ‘patriarch’ of Venetian painting in 1515, and definitively attributed to him during the twentieth century after a critical discussion lasting four centuries.

Information on the exhibition