The Victory of Joshua over the Amorites

Nicolas Poussin painted this crowded battle in Rome around 1625, early in his career and at a hard moment. He had come to Italy leaning on the poet Giambattista Marino, and when Marino died in 1625 Poussin lost his protector and slipped into real poverty. He made this scene of Joshua routing the Amorites as one of a matching pair, and ended up having to sell both simply to get by. The two canvases stayed together for centuries, eventually entering the collection of Catherine the Great of Russia, before being separated in 1927. This half of the pair is a dense knot of soldiers, horses and raised weapons packed edge to edge, the young Poussin working out how to stage violence across a battlefield.