The Flood

The Flood, dated 1625 and now in the Louvre, represents Turchi's engagement with the dramatic Old Testament narrative of Noah's flood — a subject that invited painters to show masses of humanity in extremis, struggling against rising waters. Unlike his preferred half-length devotional compositions, a Flood scene typically demanded a wider narrative sweep, with bodies tumbling across the picture plane in attitudes of terror and despair. This places the painting in a tradition running from Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling through Poussin's contemporaneous treatments of the subject. By 1625 Turchi was a mature artist working in Rome, and the Louvre's holding of this canvas reflects its appeal to French collectors. The subject's combination of divine judgement and human suffering aligned with Counter-Reformation meditations on mortality and salvation, while its dramatic possibilities — churning water, twisting bodies, falling figures — tested a painter's compositional and anatomical command.

A multi-figure cataclysm scene requires Turchi to abandon his favoured intimate format for a wider composition with multiple figure groups. The oil medium on canvas allows him to render water and sky with fluid, broad brushwork contrasting with the more carefully modelled human figures in the foreground. Dark storm-lit skies press down on the writhing figures below.