El triunfo de Pan

Poussin sent this out of Rome in May 1636, crated for Cardinal Richelieu's new château in Poitou. Richelieu had taken France into open war with Spain the year before, and three months after the crate left, Spanish troops crossed the Somme, took Corbie and put an invading army within a few days' march of Paris. What the Cardinal had ordered from Rome were bacchanals. This one was to hang in a room called the Cabinet du Roi with two companions, a Triumph of Bacchus now in Kansas City and a Triumph of Silenus. Poussin built the dancing out of Roman sarcophagi he had studied and a Bellini he knew in a Roman collection, and he dropped masks and pipes in the foreground, the props of the plays that went with these festivals. The horned, red-faced statue the crowd presses around may be Pan. The National Gallery, which bought the painting in 1982, allows that it may equally be Priapus.