Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665)Nicolas Poussin was a leader of pictorial classicism in the Baroque period. Except for two years as court painter to Louis XIII, he spent his entire career in Rome. His paintings of scenes from the Bible and from Greco-Roman antiquity influenced generations of French painters, including Jacques-Louis David, J.-A.-D. Ingres, and Paul Cézanne. Poussin believed in reason as the guiding principle of art, yet his figures are never merely cold or lifeless. They may resemble figures used by Raphael or ancient Roman sculptures in their poses, but they retain a strange and unmistakable vitality of their own. Even in Poussin's late period, when all movement, including gesture and facial expression, had been reduced to a minimum, his forms harmoniously combine vitality with intellectual order.
 Midas and Baccus, 1629: This French Baroque painting represents the granting of the gift of the golden touch by Bacchus, or Dionysos, to the king of Phrygia, Midas. The gift was given in return for Midas' helping Silenus, a follower of Bacchus.
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