Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice

Poussin painted this in Rome around 1650, working the way he liked, building a calm, ordered landscape and then hiding a catastrophe inside it. In the foreground the poet Orpheus sits playing his lyre to Eurydice, unaware that at this instant, off to the side, a snake in the grass is about to bite her and carry her down to the underworld. Look past them to the castle on the water, where a plume of dark smoke rises from a tower. Poussin scholars read that distant fire as an echo of the disaster about to strike the couple, a warning folded quietly into the scenery. The tower itself is based on the Castel Sant'Angelo, the fortress Poussin could see across the Tiber from his own Rome.