Saint Frances Announcing the End of the Plague in Rome

Rome had just come through a horror. In 1656 and 1657 plague tore through Italy, killing vast numbers in Naples and reaching into Rome itself. As the dying finally slowed, Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi, a churchman who would later become pope, commissioned this painting as a thank-offering to Frances of Rome, a medieval saint long turned to in times of sickness. Poussin was past sixty and would not live many more years. He shows the saint at the moment the scourge is called off: above the huddled and the fallen, an angel that had carried the plague lowers its arrows at her word. The picture stayed in private hands for centuries. The Louvre acquired it only in 1999, and it hangs now in the museum's Richelieu wing.