Landscape with a Man killed by a Snake

Some decades after the painter's death, the French archbishop and writer François Fénelon wrote an imaginary conversation about this painting between Poussin and Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo asks whether it tells a story. Poussin answers that it is a caprice, a thing of his own invention. No text has ever been found behind it. What he painted, probably in 1648 for the Paris merchant Jean Pointel, one of his regular buyers, is fear passing from person to person across a landscape. A man lies dead by the water, crushed in the coils of a snake. A second man has seen him and runs. A woman sitting further on sees only the running man and throws out her arms. Out on the lake the fishermen see only her.