Jacob Asking for Laban

Fleeing for his life, Jacob seeks refuge with his uncle, Laban, living in “the land of the people of the east.” While Jacob discusses Laban’s whereabouts with shepherds, all the animals in the foreground gaze intently at the viewer. They take center stage, not the humans. The painting represents the Genoese fondness for animals in artwork, a taste stimulated by Northern European genre painting and depictions of keenly observed animals. During the early seventeenth century, Dutch and Flemish artists, along with others throughout Europe, moved to Genoa to meet its large demand for art, especially decoration of palaces owned by the city’s wealthy families.

Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione established a thriving family workshop with his brother Salvatore and son Francesco. Salvatore was once characterized as the commercial manager of his brother’s more successful artistic career due to the limited number of surviving works signed by him, but the monumentality of the figures in this painting has led scholar Anna Orlando to suggest that Salvatore painted the figures and that Francesco may have contributed the background. Other scholars maintain this is a work by Francesco alone.