The Deluge

Author: Alicia Rojas Costa

‘In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month – on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights’ (Genesis 7:11-12). This dynamic landscape almost certainly represents the scene of the Universal Flood and the moment when people had to move their families and belongings because of the rising waters. We face villagers, common people, who are forced to flee from their countryside and climb hills while carrying their possessions. In the centre of the background, underneath the heavy rain and between the bent trees, Noah’s ark awaits the rising waters that will destroy all forms of life on earth.

Until recently, this drawing was attributed to the Flemish artist Gillis van Coninxloo II (1544-1606/1607). In 1968, Giorgio T. Faggin proposed a different authorship for the sheet, suggesting the figure of Giovanni Domenico Zapponi (active 1602-1617), an artist whose identity remains, to a large extent, a mystery.^[1] Born in Verona, Zapponi grew up in a cultivated environment. He was familiar with the work of Dutch Masters, especially with Netherlandish landscapes. Zapponi’s work thus falls under the Dutch-Venetian tradition of a group of artists who travelled through northern Europe but whose Italian roots remained present. This community of artists also included Dutch migrants who settled in German territory.^[2] It is precisely the ambivalent stylistic character of this drawing that has led scholars to oscillate between a Netherlandish or Italian attribution. In the year 1602, Zapponi travelled to Frankfurt am Main, where an important community of Dutch migrants resided, among them Gillis van Coninxloo II and Gillis van Valckenborch (1570-1622), two of his main inspirations and masters.

While the attribution may remain somewhat open for debate, the drawing is nevertheless a good example of a tradition that brought together elements from north and south. The scene’s dramatic character is provided by the treatment of nature. In this drawing, the northern tradition is exemplified through the depiction of nature as an aggressive force, with driving rain, fallen trunks and trees that are bent from the force of the wind. For Gillis van Coninxloo, the motif of the forest had become a constant motif around 1600, and it was probably then when Zapponi adopted it in his own oeuvre.^[3] The thoroughness with which all the secondary scenes are depicted, with no single centre for the action, also derives from the Netherlandish tradition.

Faggin based his attribution to Zapponi on purely stylistic reasons. He recovered the identity of Zapponi and established him as the author of this drawing thanks to four engravings – conserved at the Rijksmuseum’s print room in Amsterdam – made by Johan Barra (1581-1634) after Giovanni Domenico Zapponi.^[4] One of these engravings, which narrates the story of Tobias, contains an inscription mentioning the name of Zapponi as creator of the scene: ‘J. Dominico Zapponij. Verones. Invent:’. There is only one other known drawing attributed to Zapponi, which is conserved in the Bernard Houthakker collection in Amsterdam.^[5]

Regarding the purpose of this drawing, the Rotterdam sheet is probably a preparatory design for a composition which has not yet been identified. The artist was more concerned with a general depiction of the scene than with smaller details, such as the figures, which are not individualized and blend closely into the landscape. This drawing stands, therefore, as a witness to the exchange of knowledge between north and south that was taking place at the beginning of the seventeenth century in central Europe.