DIJON, FRANCE.- Musée Magnin presents Visions Du Deluge, on view through January 10, 2007. The exhibition was organised by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, the Musée Magnin, Dijon, and the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (where it will be shown from 2 February to 29 April 2007). Sponsored by La Lyonnaise de Banque.

The famous episode of the Flood recounted in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, has often been depicted in European art and has given rise to numerous books, but to date no exhibition has been held on the subject in France.

The exhibition traces the remarkable process in which a historical subject becomes the subject of a landscape. It shows how the same historia can be treated in a Mannerist or pre-Romantic style.

Aesthetically, it is interesting to see that a violent subject, consistent with the "horrific" sublime in vogue in the late 18th century – a time when the flood enjoyed renewed interest – can also be rooted in a classic register and refer to the sublime simplicity of artists such as Poussin.

That is why natural catastrophes are included in the exhibition alongside the Flood: from the 18th century, in both cases they provided terrifying visions of nature which broke with the canons of classical beauty, illustrating the comparable effects of Providence or the history of the Earth.

In the context of the desacralisation that occurred in the first half of the 19th century, the interest that artists showed in the Great Flood proves that it was still regarded as a founding event.

The biblical episode was a historical subject common in the works of the 16th and 17th centuries; Raphael and Michelangelo painted frescos of the dramatic moment when the waters rose and their works became models. Sensitive to the moral dimension of the episode, the Nordic artists focused on the causes of the flood – the corruption of mankind – and the New Covenant which followed. In these pictures, Noah's Ark – the symbol of Salvation beyond the end of the first wave of mankind – tends to be relegated to the background, while the foreground is filled with scenes of human distress. Faced with the difficulty of representing chaos, the artists resorted to painting a tangle of human bodies in sweeping panoramic compositions.

The Deluge by Nicolas Poussin marks a turning point in the treatment of the subject. Painted between 1660 and 1664, the work (represented here by an early copy) shows a "tragic landscape" which holds the promise of a new beginning. A cold grey mood replaces the piled-up bodies; agitation has given way to tranquillity and prayer – and the family scene is exemplary. The landscape takes on an allegorical value, that of the common destiny of man and nature, which was extensively discussed in the following century.

When the theme aroused fresh interest in the last twenty years of the 18th century, Poussin’s painting was not forgotten and served as a source for many artists. But there was an ideological reversal: the religious reference gave way to literary sources (Salomon Gessner in Switzerland, John Milton in England) which expressed individual distress. The Flood became a pretext for tragic genre scenes which reveal a growing sense of anxiety linked to social upheavals in progress or looming on the horizon.

This is where natural catastrophes cross paths with the Flood. Man is equally the victim of God’s will or unpredictable natural events. Although depictions of the eruption of Vesuvius are often picturesque, those of the earthquakes of Lisbon and Messina express new awareness of the insecurity of human life which, combined with the scientific curiosity of the Enlightenment, produced works in which the “horrible” spectacle of nature, such as the Flood, fitted into the aesthetic category of the sublime as it was defined by Edmund Burke in 1757.

In France, during the first half of the 19th century, the Flood gave rise to melodramatic dual or family scenes. Grandiose landscapes inspired by the deluge developed more particularly in England. The revival of the debate between science and religion about the origin of the world and mankind shines through in the evocation of a comet, antediluvian animals or the angels mentioned in Genesis.

Curators: Rémi Cariel, Director of the Musée Magnin, and Sylvie Wuhrmann, art historian.