Bacco-Apollo

Nicolas Poussin reached Rome in 1624, a painter from Normandy in his early thirties who had scraped his way south to study the ancient world at its source. This picture comes from those first Roman years, when he was still working out the calm, ordered manner that would make him the father of French classical painting. He fuses two gods into one young figure, crowned with ivy and holding the thyrsus, the pinecone-tipped staff of Bacchus, the god of wine, while a musician seated in ochre plays to one side under Apollo, god of the arts. An X-ray has caught him changing his mind: beneath the surface lies a different, earlier scene he painted out. The warm browns and glowing flesh show how hard he was then looking at Titian.