Camille Delivers the Schoolmaster of Falerii to His Pupils

Nicolas Poussin painted this in Rome in 1637 for a French official, one of nine scenes of ancient virtue ordered for the gilded gallery of a grand new house in Paris. The story comes from Plutarch. A schoolmaster in the besieged town of Falerii tried to win favour with the Roman general Camillus by leading his young pupils out to the enemy camp as hostages. Camillus refused the bribe, had the man stripped and bound, and handed him back to the boys to be whipped home. Poussin gives the traitor a twisted, ungainly body and the general a calm upright one, so the difference between them reads before you even know the tale. The painting was seized for the French state during the Revolution and has hung in the Louvre since.