The Israelites gathering Manna in the Desert

Poussin painted this in Rome at the end of the 1630s for a French friend and patron, Paul Freart de Chantelou, and he sent it north with an unusual instruction: read the picture as you would read a text. The scene comes from Exodus. The Israelites, starving in the desert, wake to find manna fallen like frost on the ground. Poussin spreads their reactions across the canvas in stages, an old man too weak to gather, a woman choosing to nurse her aged mother before feeding herself, others already scrambling for the food. Decades later, at the young French Academy in Paris, this canvas became a set text of its own, argued over in formal lectures as the model for how a picture should tell a story.