The painting “Moses Driver”. The Old Testament event – Moses receiving the stone tablets – happened on Mount Sinai when the glory of the Lord reached her. The plot is not just interpreted by many artists. Alexander Ivanov embodies it in his biblical sketches in the clear light of the day as the upcoming Moses with his head bowed and his hands folded before bodily imperceptible, but still really outlined, sitting on a stone throne and merging with the heavenly light of God in human form.
At Roerich, Mount Sinai is not a flat catwalk, like that of Ivanov, but a rocky peak. It was covered by a cloud, darker than night, and the glory of the Lord is represented in the picture in the form of a winding ribbon of the northern lights. Such an artistic idea of Roerich cannot be considered absolutely far-fetched, since it is known that at such a southern latitude auroral phenomena are extremely rarely recorded by ionospheric stations.
Moses, as if crowning the summit, stretched his arms upward and almost touched streams of light pouring from Space. Parallel strokes of light green with white corpuscles on a bluish-black background give rise to a feeling of phosphorescent radiance. And rhyming columns of aurora rays incident on one another are all like an open book of tablets, like a manifestation of cosmic fire, the logo of which Moses listens. Roerich has cosmic fire – a spiritual and material substance capable of connecting the highest and the earthly, God and man. With its help, it is possible to convey an illumined fiery thought – this is how one should understand the meaning of the “fire vision” of Moses.
In the picture of Nicholas Roerich – on the sharp rocky top of the sacred mountain of Sinai, the Great Prophet Moses, in a fiery fit, raised his hands to the sky illuminated by multicolor fiery flashes of aurora, hears the Voice of God and receives the Divine Law given to all mankind – the Ten Commandments.
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