The emotional intensity of Moses’s encounter with God is conveyed here by the seemingly explosive force emanating from God and the Tablets of the Law. The rays emanating from Moses’s head refer to the text of Exodus 34:29: “the skin of his face shone.” Below on the plain, the Israelites are seen dancing around a golden calf; when Moses descended and found them engaged in this idolatry, he smashed the tablets. Raymond Lafage’s oeuvre consists of several hundred drawings, most in the loose energetic style seen here, as well as thirty etchings. Lafage died at age twenty-eight, after a fall from a donkey. Over two hundred prints reproducing his drawings, published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, attest to the enormous appeal of his work after his death.