The Destruction and Sack of the Temple of Jerusalem

In 1625 Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the pope's nephew, travelled to Paris and to Madrid as a papal envoy trying to talk France and Spain out of a war. He got nowhere. Back in Rome he had Poussin paint this and sent it to Cardinal Richelieu, the minister who ran France for Louis the Thirteenth. The subject is the Roman sack of Jerusalem in the year 70, the Temple burning at the back and the emperor Titus on a white horse in the middle of the fighting, and Roman writers had it that Titus tried to spare the Temple and was overtaken by his own soldiers. After Richelieu died the painting passed from owner to owner, reached England and dropped out of sight in the late 1700s. In 1995 the art historian Denis Mahon found it under lacquer and dirt, catalogued as the work of a minor painter and described as the conquest of Carthage. It was cleaned and given to the Israel Museum in 1998.