In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this was one of Champaigne’s best known images because of engravings and the fact that two of the three versions were in prestigious collections. The version in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg since 1808 was previously in the Paris collection of the duc de Choiseul-Praslin, while the Schorr version was in the celebrated collection of Napoleon’s uncle, Cardinal Fesch, in Rome. This picture was later in the collection of the well-known Paris surgeon, Le Roy d’Etiolles. Neither of these pictures corresponded to the engraving published in 1699.  The engraved composition reappeared in the early twentieth century and is now in the Milwaukee Art Center.  The subject is taken from Exodus, where God speaks to Moses with the Ten Commandments, ‘And the Lord said unto Moses, come up to me into the mount, and be there; and I will give thee tables of stone, and a law, and commandments which I have written; that thou mayest teach them’. The subject is also referred to again in Deuteronomy, ‘At that time the Lord said unto me, Hew thee two tables of stone liken to the first, and come up unto me into the mount. And I will write on the tables the words that were in the first tables ….’.   It is likely that the artist is using the second Biblical quotation as there are clearly two tables of stone in the picture. Champaigne favoured the old man used as a model in this picture as he appears in a very similar pose in artist’s St. Paul in the Musée des Beaux-Arts at Troyes. The same model was also employed in the Presentation in the Temple painted for the church of Saint Honoré in Paris, in 1642, and now in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts at Brussels.

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