Paisaje con San Juan en Patmos

Poussin spent his working life in Rome, and in 1640 a papal official there paid him 40 écus for this picture and a companion, each showing a gospel writer alone in a landscape. This one is Saint John, banished to the Greek island of Patmos, where he set down his visions. He sits writing, the eagle that stands for him just behind. But look at the setting. Poussin fills it with broken Roman columns and temple stones, and lays everything out in calm, level bands as ordered as architecture. He is placing the new faith among the ruins of the classical world, as its heir. The companion picture, a Saint Matthew, hung beside it once and is now in Berlin.