Lot and His Daughters

Simon Vouet had recently come home to Paris after nearly 15 years in Italy, where he had absorbed the warm colour and theatrical light of the Roman Baroque and risen high enough to head the artists' academy in Rome. Back in France by the early 1630s he became Louis XIII's leading painter, and this canvas of 1633 shows the style he brought with him. The subject, from Genesis, let a respectable painter get away with open sensuality: Lot, fled from the burning city of Sodom, is plied with wine by his two daughters, who believe the world has ended and mean to bear his children. Vouet plays it as a tangle of soft flesh and drunken warmth, the old man flushed between two young women in a cave.