L'altro Noè : La Bibbia attraverso il filtro delle cronache universali

When an artist tackles the depiction of a biblical episode or character, he is conditioned by a set of notions that come inter alia from exegesis and historiography, which connects that fact or character with a historical continuum. The dimension of universal historiography became particularly vivid from the twelfth century, starting with a work that was formally still exegetical, Peter Comestore’s Historia scholastica, then spreading through encyclopaedias and chronicles of the following centuries (such as the Cronaca universalis of the Milanese Dominican Galvano Fiamma). The article illustrates the methods of structuring and reinterpreting the biblical events and the related facts of secular history through the example of the figure of Noah and the episode of the ark.