The Israelites Gathering Manna

In the wilderness the starving Israelites discover the manna fallen from heaven, and Poussin spreads their reactions across the canvas like a sequence of acted emotions - despair, disbelief, gratitude, and a woman who, in her hunger, suckles her own mother while neglecting her child (Exodus 16). He arranged the crowd as a classical relief, each gesture legible, to dramatize his belief that painting should move the mind through clear expression. Now in the Louvre, it is a cornerstone of his theory of art as a rational, eloquent language of bodies.