Moïse enfant foulant aux pieds la couronne de Pharaon

You will not find this scene in the Bible. It comes from Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian of the first century, who tells how Pharaoh, to please his daughter, set his crown on the head of the infant Moses, and the child threw it to the ground and trod on it. An Egyptian priest took it as an evil omen and called for the boy to be killed. Poussin paints that moment of alarm. The boy's foot rests on the fallen crown, a man lifts a knife, and the women around the princess throw up their hands. In Poussin's day the episode was read as a foreshadowing of Christ. In 1625 the Jesuit preacher François Garasse put it plainly: Moses despised the crown of Egypt as Christ despised the crowns of this world. Poussin painted it around 1646.