"Descent of Noah from Ararat"

The illusion that Aivazovsky creates here, around the Old Testament story of Noah and his family leading the animals down from the postdiluvian resting place of their ark, is of a shared past sustained by supposedly timeless truths and uncorrupted by the prospect of radical human dissent from those truths. This implied message would have been reassuring to many of Aivazovsky's admirers at the time but anathema to others who believed that art's responsibility was increasingly to question, not reassure.