Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice
The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice set in an ideal landscape — into which Poussin has slipped an unmistakable Castel Sant'Angelo.
Castel Sant'Angelo
The painting shows a real, identified place that you can find today. The exact spot the artist worked from is not necessarily known.
Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice — at a glance
- Artist
- Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665)
- Year
- c. 1650–1653
- Movement
- French Classicism (Baroque Rome)
- Place
- An ideal landscape with the Castel Sant'Angelo, Rome, in the background
- Viewpoint
- An invented classical landscape into which a real, still-standing Roman monument is transplanted
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- c. 124 × 200 cm
- Now at
- Musée du Louvre, Paris
Overview
Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice is one of the grand ideal landscapes Nicolas Poussin painted in Rome in the early 1650s. Beside a calm lake, Orpheus plays his lyre to a company of listeners; his bride Eurydice, at the right, recoils from a snake in the grass that will kill her — while, unnoticed, a fisherman looks on and smoke or vapour rises from a building on the far shore. Behind the lake stands a large fortress that is clearly the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome. It is oil on canvas, about 124 by 200 cm, and it hangs in the Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Where was Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice painted?
Scholarship The landscape as a whole is an invented, classical composition — framing trees, a still lake, distant blue hills — of the kind Poussin built in the studio. But the massive round castle across the water is unmistakably the Castel Sant'Angelo (Hadrian's mausoleum turned papal fortress) on the Tiber in Rome, complete with its angular bastions. Poussin has transplanted a real, still-standing Roman monument into a mythological scene, so the ‘place’ is part real, part ideal.
What is in the painting?
In the foreground, Orpheus sits on a bank playing the lyre, wreathed, with three or four seated and standing listeners; a wedding is in progress. To the right, Eurydice starts back from a snake, her arm raised. Beyond them, the smooth lake with a fisherman and a swan; on the far shore, the great castle with fire and smoke rising near it; trees, and pale hills against a serene sky.
Look closely
The snake
In the grass near Eurydice at the right; she recoils, arm raised — the moment before her death.
The Castel Sant'Angelo
The massive round castle with angular bastions across the lake — Hadrian's mausoleum, still standing in Rome.
The rising smoke
Fire and vapour near the castle — a quiet omen in a calm scene.
The oblivious fisherman
A man fishes on the lake, wholly unaware of the tragedy on the bank.
Analysis
Composition and technique
A calm, balanced ideal landscape whose serenity is quietly undercut by the snake, the smoke and the fisherman.
Scholarship Poussin builds the picture on horizontals and gentle diagonals — bank, lake, far shore, hills — and hides the tragedy in plain sight: the snake near Eurydice, the ominous smoke by the castle, the indifferent fisherman. Order and disaster coexist in one measured design.
Meaning and interpretation
Interpretations differ. What the artist documented, what museums and scholars propose, and later or speculative theories are marked and kept separate.
Death in Arcadia
The picture is read as another of Poussin's meditations on mortality within a golden world: even at a wedding, in an ideal landscape watched over by an eternal Roman monument, death (the snake, the smoke) is already present and unseen. The Castel Sant'Angelo — a tomb become a fortress — reinforces the theme.
History & provenance
The painting entered the French royal collection in the seventeenth century and is in the Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Sources
- Musée du Louvre, Paris — collection entry for Nicolas Poussin, ‘Paysage avec Orphée et Eurydice’ (c. 1650–53)
- Pierre Rosenberg, ‘Nicolas Poussin’ (Grand Palais, 1994)
Related paintings
The Adoration of the Golden Calf
1634
Poussin's biblical narrative in an ideal landscape — the same studio-built classical world.
Castel Sant'Angelo and Tiber
1826
Corot painting the real castle on the spot, two centuries later.
The Inspiration of the Poet
1629
Poussin's Parnassus — pure myth without a real landmark.
More by Nicolas Poussin
The Adoration of the Golden Calf