Saints Peter and John Healing the Lame Man

By 1655 Poussin had spent most of his life in Rome and had no intention of leaving. A wretched two years as first painter to the French king in the early 1640s had cured him of court life, and he now worked slowly, in his own manner, for a handful of private collectors. This one was ordered by a Monsieur Mercier of Lyon. He took the scene from the third chapter of Acts, where Peter and John meet a lame beggar at the temple gate and heal him. Poussin built it the way he built everything late in life, in careful, stage-like order across the temple steps, the way Raphael had. Watch the two central hands. The reaching arm of the beggar and the arm of the apostle answer each other across the gap, an echo of Michelangelo's Adam on the Sistine ceiling.