El triunfo de Flora

Poussin painted this soon after settling in Rome in the 1620s, a young Frenchman teaching himself antiquity at its source. Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, rides through the picture in a chariot pulled by two winged boys, surrounded by nymphs and cupids scattering blossoms, with the god Mars standing to one side. In these years Poussin was studying the ancient reliefs around him and the sensuous mythologies Titian had painted a century before, and both feed this parade. He would grow far more austere later, the measured painter the French academy held up as its model, while this early scene stays warm, crowded, and full of movement. He was in his early thirties when he made it, not long arrived in the city that would keep him for the rest of his life.