I funerali di Focione

Phocion was an Athenian general the city put to death on a false charge, then punished even in death. His enemies had it decreed that no one in Attica could burn his body, so it was carried beyond the border and cremated by a hired stranger. Poussin painted that moment in 1648, from Rome, for a French merchant, while his own country was sliding into the civil unrest of the Fronde. He set the injustice inside a landscape of almost mathematical calm, the buildings squared off, the light even, a temple and a tower rising behind. In the foreground two men carry the shrouded body out on a bier, small against the calm, ordered city that has just condemned him.