O Testamento de Eudamidas

The dying man on the bed is Eudamidas, a poor citizen of ancient Corinth, and the scene comes from a little-read dialogue by the Greek writer Lucian. Having nothing to leave, he dictates a will handing the care of his mother and daughter to two friends, trusting they will honour it. Poussin painted this in Rome in the 1640s for a small circle of learned collectors who prized exactly this kind of Stoic restraint. He gives it almost nothing: a bare room, a few figures, a scribe taking down the words, the women grieving to one side. There is no grandeur here, no crowd, no colour to speak of. That plainness was deliberate, and it became a model of noble simplicity for the neoclassical painters who studied Poussin a century later.