Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun

Poussin painted this in 1658, near the end of his life in Rome, when a tremor in his hands had begun to disrupt his work. The subject is strange and rarely painted. Orion, the giant hunter of Greek myth, has been blinded, and an oracle tells him his sight will return if he walks east to meet the rising sun. So he strides across the land as a colossus, a small guide perched on his shoulders to steer him and the smith-god Hephaestus watching from below. Poussin took the tale from Lucian, a satirist writing in the 2nd century. Look at the sky and you can see the whole story turning: a storm breaking up into cloud, clearing the way for the sunlight that will heal him.