Adam Elsheimer, 'Saint Paul on Malta', about 1600

Firelight and jagged streaks of light illuminate an otherwise pitch-dark setting. The turbulent sea tosses the wrecked ship’s cargo against the rocks; the strength of the gale forces the seawater to arc over a boulder and shoot up high against the cliffs, where it rains down as froth. The flames of the lighthouse, perched high on a craggy peak, are blown uncontrollably to one side, demonstrating the force of the storm. The wind agitates the fire that warms the wreck’s survivors as well as their clothes, throwing up red-hot ash which glitters in the darkness.

The story of Saint Paul’s shipwreck on the island of Malta is described in Acts (28: 1–6) – the apostle was on his way to Rome where he was to face punishment at the hands of the Romans. Adam Elsheimer has taken advantage of the biblical description, which describes the rain and cold, to portray a night scene: ‘And the barbarous people shewed us no little kindness: for they kindled a fire, and received us every one, because of the present rain, and because of the cold’ (Acts 28: 2). This allowed him to use strong contrasts of light and darkness for dramatic effect. At the largest fire at the left corner – the brightest part of the picture – Saint Paul calmly drops a snake, which had bitten him, into the flames. The islanders who saw that he had not been injured by the snake’s venom were convinced that he was a god.

The nakedness of some of the figures and the wildness of the landscape seems to evoke the primitive atmosphere Paul describes. Elsheimer has not paid the same attention to the anatomy of the figures here as he did to those of Christ and John the Baptist in the Baptism of Christ. But he has taken care to paint a variety of people, elderly men, young women and even a baby who clings to his mother’s back as she dries her clothes around the central fire.

Elsheimer’s preferred surface was copper, its smooth surface enabling him to paint minute details like the scales of the writhing snake here. The scene has been compared with paintings of shipwrecks by the Flemish painter Frederick van Valckenborch, whose dramatic nocturnal images Elsheimer may have seen in Frankfurt in the final years of the sixteenth century.