The Blind of Jericho

Nicolas Poussin painted this in Rome in 1650 for a French silk merchant in Lyon named Reynon. By then Poussin, though French, had lived most of his working life in Italy and had become the model of a severe, carefully reasoned classicism that later French painters would treat almost as law. The subject comes from Matthew's gospel: leaving Jericho, Christ stops to touch the eyes of two blind men at the roadside. Poussin gives almost nothing to spectacle. The drama is carried by hands and faces — one man still sunk in darkness, the other's head tilting back as sight arrives — read across a frieze of onlookers before the pale walls of the town.