The Deluge

The Deluge belongs to a group of drawings that Brebiette made in the early 1630s as a commission from French poet Jacques Favereau (1590-1638) to be engraved as illustrations for a book of sonnets titled Tableaux des vertus et des vices. The project was likely considered incomplete at the time of Favereau’s death in 1638 but was later revived and expanded by print collector and scholar Michel de Marolles (1600-1681) who ultimately published a volume based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and accompanied by his own commentary in 1655 under the title Tableaux du Temple des Muses. The majority of plates in Marolles’s edition are after drawings by the Flemish artist Abraham van Diepenbeeck (1596-1675) who, in many cases, relied quite heavily on Brebiette’s compositions.

While the drawing is based on Ovid’s flowery account of the flood, and has certain elements in common with earlier depictions of the subject, for the most part it is not a literal illustration, but a highly inventive visual exploration with a focus on horror and despair. Brebiette’s manner of depicting the destructive forces of rain, as staccato lines of dashes, and floodwaters, as swirling serpentine patterns, lends a great aesthetic beauty to his apocalyptic vision.

Perrin Stein, May 2014