Marco Marcola (1740–1793), Sacrifice Of Isaac, Drawing, Ink Wash

Marco Marcola (1740–1793) was an Italian painter born inVerona.
Introduced to the art of drawing and painting by his father, Giovanni Battista, he was primarily active in his native region.
In his drawings, the artist favors striking contrasts of shadow andlight, as seen in this drawing and in his Caius Mucius Scaevola sticking his right hand into the fire, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
His ambitious compositions are always well-arranged and beautifully composed.
As a painter, he became known for his fresco decorations invillas in Veneto and Lombardy, which account for his keen sense of narrative and hismastery of the skillful construction of space.
This Sacrifice of Isaac deals with a famous subject, very oftendepicted in painting, drawing, and sculpture.
Indeed, while the subject is dramatic, it is also visually spectacular and allows for the expression ofpowerful emotions through a tragic scene—that of the sacrifice of an only sonkilled by his own father’s hand.
The subject is drawn from the Old Testament (Genesis 22:1–19); it expresses obediencebut above all absolute trust in God, who, at the last moment, will save son of Abraham through the intervention of an angel, who replaces the young man with aram.
The artist places Abraham at the center of the composition, stand ingover his son, who lies on the pyre of wood prepared for the sacrifice.
The arm holdingthe knife is stopped by the angel’s intervention, depicted along a largediagonal line that effectively conveys the power of divine intervention through beautiful, dynamic gestures.
The two animal motifs essential to understanding the narrative appear: on the left side of the composition, the ram hiddenin the bushes—which will take the place of the young man ready to be sacrificed—and on theright, the donkey that had carried the wood on its back to the top of Mount Moriah, where the scene takes place.