Noah’s Ark

The animals are bug-eyed and whimsical — frightened to be on a boat or afraid to be sharing space with predators. Noah stares with concern and doubt out to sea. A bird, not a dove, returns with a plastic bottle he had plucked from a polluted ocean. There is a mirrored version of the screaming horse from “Guernica,” Picasso’s 1937 anti-war masterpiece.

I have included other people hoping to survive the flood. A couple in an inner tube are panicking (you can’t see it, but their tube has a small leak). A cocky man in a boat is about to be submerged by an octopus. A large fish is going to consume a hopeful stowaway, clinging to an elephant’s very long proboscis.

The angels are dousing the world with buckets of water; rain simply wasn’t enough. The figure in the center is adding water, too — urinating angels have been common in sculpture and painting since the Renaissance.

“The spiritelli d’acqua (water spirit) engage in an action devoid of taint or scandal. There is innocent humor, to be sure, but neither mockery nor insolence. Like the Renaissance viewer, we must recognize evident joy, wittiness and playfulness, without aversion or intimations of impertinence.^1″

_{1 A. Victor Coonin, “The Spirit of Water: Reconsidering the Putto Microns Sculpture in Renaissance Florence,” in A Scarlet Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Sarah Blake McHam, 81-110 (New York: Italica Press, 2013), 87.}