Landscape with Ruins

A path winds away between funerary monuments towards a group of temples, and one of the two figures in the foreground is showing it to the other. Poussin painted this landscape in 1642, and the museum reads the path as a road of tombs of the kind that ran out of an ancient city. The canvas later belonged to Carlo Maratti, the leading painter in Rome of the following generation, and after his death his daughter Faustina put his collection up for sale. In 1722 Philip V of Spain and his queen bought 124 pictures from it for 17,000 ducados, this one among them, and the Spanish cardinal in Rome had to obtain the pope's permission before the crates could leave the city. The painting then hung at the palace of La Granja for a century, until the museum took it in 1827.