Парнас

Poussin was a Frenchman who had moved to Rome in 1624 and spent his first years there studying the city's antiquities and its great earlier painters. Around 1632 he painted this scene of Apollo among the nine Muses on Mount Parnassus, and he built it as an open tribute to Raphael, whose fresco of the same subject he could study on the walls of the Vatican. Apollo hands a poet, probably Homer, the drink of the gods while a muse crowns him with laurel. Poussin most likely also meant it for Giambattista Marino, the celebrated Italian poet who had befriended and helped him early on and had died a few years before. The picture later entered the Spanish royal collection and hangs now in the Prado.