The Infant Bacchus Entrusted to the Nymphs of Nysa; The Death of Echo and Narcissus

Poussin was a French painter who spent almost his whole working life in Rome, making pictures for a small circle of learned collectors who liked to read a canvas the way they would read a poem. This late one, from 1657, folds two of Ovid's stories into a single landscape. On one side the infant Bacchus, god of wine and growth, is handed to the nymphs to be raised in secret. On the other lies Narcissus, who wasted away in love with his own reflection, mourned by the nymph Echo, herself faded to nothing but a voice. Growth on the one hand and sterile longing on the other, set in the same shaded grove. A friend and fellow painter, Jacques Stella, had asked him for the picture, and by these years Poussin's hand had begun to shake as he worked.