Room 29

In Poussin’s The Adoration of the Golden Calf, a crowd circles an object of worship while another part of the biblical story unfolds nearby. Look at the gestures and the spacing between the figures. Poussin organised complex narratives with the care of a staged scene. He spent most of his career in Rome, where ancient sculpture and Renaissance painting offered models to study. French patrons also looked to Rome as they built collections and institutions in Paris. This room brings those ambitions together through religious stories, portraits and landscape. Compare the ordering of a group of people with the ordering of buildings and light in a painted view.