Landscape with Diogenes

Poussin's friend and biographer André Félibien wrote that in 1648 the painter made, for a Monsieur Lumague of a Lyon merchant family, a large landscape in which Diogenes breaks his bowl. For almost three centuries that line was read as a description of this canvas. In 1961 the scholar Denis Mahon pointed out that nothing gets broken here, and argued that a landscape held together by light more than by buildings belonged to the late 1650s. The ancient story tells how the philosopher saw someone drinking from cupped hands and threw away his own cup as one more thing he did not need. Specialists are still divided, and the Louvre now dates it between 1654 and 1658. Down on the path a figure kneels to drink from the water, and far off among the trees stands a palace modelled on the Belvedere in Rome.