Zipporah

John Ruskin

1874

Pencil, watercolor, and bodycolor

143 x 54 cm.

Ruskin Library, University of Lancaster (1996Po880)

The catalogue entry in The Botticelli Renaissance, the catalogue of the 2015-16 Berlin-London exhibition, notes that “this is part of Botticelli’s fresco of The Temptation of Moses in the Sistine Chapel, and represents the daughter of Jethro who became the wife of Moses. Ruskin described his large watercolour ‘as nearly a facsimile as I can make it.’ After studying Botticelli’s fresco’s in 1872 he pronounced his preference for these works over Michelangelo’s far more celebrated Sistine frescoes” (215). Ruskin used this watercolor in an 1874 lecture on the artist.

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