La Chasse de Méléagre

In the 1630s a Frenchman named Nicolas Poussin was living in Rome, quietly building a reputation among cardinals and collectors for pictures that read like classical literature made visible. This long frieze shows a moment from Ovid, the great hunt setting out for Calydon, where a giant boar sent by an angry Diana is ravaging the fields. The heroes ride out in procession, and you can pick out Atalanta, the one woman allowed to join, in a plain blue robe on a white horse. She is the reason the story turns tragic later. Whether Poussin's own hand made this canvas is now doubted. The Prado still hangs it under his name, but a number of scholars read it instead as a studio work or a follower's, and no one has settled the question. The picture stays close to Ovid all the same, down to the open countryside ahead of the riders, before the forest closes in.