The Death of Chione

This is about as far back as Nicolas Poussin's work can be traced, a canvas from 1622, before the trip to Rome that would shape the rest of his life. He painted it while in Lyon, still a young French artist chasing patrons, and for a long time it was simply lost, only recently identified and bought by the city's museum in 2016. The story is from Ovid: Chione had boasted that her beauty outshone the goddess Diana's, and Diana answered with an arrow through her tongue. Poussin shows the moment just after, the collapsed girl and the mourners around her. Among them is her father Daedalion, whose grief, in the myth, drove him to leap from a mountain until the gods changed him into a hawk.