迈达斯与巴克斯

Poussin painted this soon after he settled in Rome in the mid-1620s, a young Frenchman soaking up antique sculpture and the warm colour of Titian. He took the moment from Ovid, when King Midas kneels before the wine god Bacchus and asks for his fatal gift, that everything he touches turn to gold. Poussin gives away the ending in the same frame. Off to the right, small and pale, Midas wades into the river Pactolus to wash the curse out of his skin, which is why the Greeks said that river ran with gold. In the foreground a nymph sleeps beside the old drunk Silenus, the ordinary pleasures Midas is about to lose the taste for.