Extreme Unction

Poussin painted this in Rome around 1638 for Cassiano dal Pozzo, an antiquarian who served as secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini and who had a standing project to have every surviving scrap of ancient Rome drawn and catalogued. He called it his paper museum, and it ran to thousands of sheets. Poussin had the run of it, and when dal Pozzo asked him for the seven sacraments of the Church, he staged them in the Rome of the first Christians, with the furniture, lamps and dress reconstructed from that antiquarian material instead of from his own century. Extreme unction is the anointing of the dying. The set stayed with dal Pozzo's heirs in Rome until 1785, when the Scottish dealer James Byres bought it for the Duke of Rutland. This picture then hung at Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire until 2012, when the Fitzwilliam raised 3.9 million pounds and brought it to Cambridge.