San Giovanni battezza il popolo

Poussin painted this in Rome in the mid-1630s, where he had settled as a Frenchman among the ruins and worked mostly for a small circle of learned collectors rather than for churches or kings. He built his pictures slowly and by hand. To plan a scene he would arrange little wax figures inside a box like a miniature stage, shifting them and the light until the grouping satisfied him, then paint from that. You can feel that method here. The people gathered around John by the river Jordan each do something different, undressing, waiting, kneeling, drying off, every one of them deliberately placed. Behind them lies a calm classical landscape of low hills and still water, composed as carefully as the crowd in front of it.