Elijah Fed by the Raven

Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo

National Gallery of Art

Close to us, a bearded man with pale, peachy skin sits against a tall, narrow rock formation against a deep landscape in this vertical painting. The man has gray hair, deep-set eyes, high cheekbones, and his lips are downturned in his long beard. He sits with his knees and body angled to our left, but he turns to look up and to our right at a raven perched on the stone. His right elbow, to our left, is propped on a rocky ledge, and his head rests in that hand. His other veined, large hand rests on his knee. He wears a voluminous, long-sleeved, aquamarine-blue robe under a cloth tied around his neck. The cloth is rose-pink on the outside and appears to be lined with fleece on the underside. Near the top right corner of the composition, the raven leans toward the man holding a roll in its beak. The man’s bare feet rest on the dirt ground, and a couple of scrubby plants grow in the lower right corner of the painting, next to the rock on which the man sits. A river cuts through grassy land in the deep distance to the left of the rock formation. Several people gathered near the water’s edge point or look up into the sky, where a man kneeling in a chariot is drawn into a peach-toned cloud bank in the blue sky. Steep mountains on the horizon are icy blue.