Landscape with Polyphemus

Poussin painted this in 1649 in Rome for a French banker, Jean Pointel, and it comes from the calm, ordered final phase of his career. The story is from Ovid. Polyphemus, the one-eyed giant who elsewhere smashes rocks and sinks ships, has fallen hopelessly in love with the sea nymph Galatea, and here he sits on a distant mountaintop, tamed, playing his pipes to her. Find him and he almost dissolves into the grey stone, while everything below has gone quiet to listen: nymphs pause at a spring, a ploughman rests in his field, satyrs step out of the trees. Catherine the Great bought the painting for Russia in 1772, and it has hung in Saint Petersburg ever since.