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Your galleryLandscape with Saint John on Patmos
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Find the eagle beside John, then the obelisk and temple across the water, and notice how the land is laid out in bands running across the picture.
Saint John, traditionally the youngest of the twelve disciples, appears here as an old man writing on the Greek island of Patmos, with his eagle beside him. Poussin built the landscape from clear shapes set parallel to the picture’s surface and filled it with remains of ancient Greece and Rome. With its companion, Landscape with Saint Matthew in Berlin, it was paid for in Rome in October 1640 by the cleric Gian Maria Roscioli.
Oil on canvas · 100.3 × 136.4 cm · Art Institute of Chicago · Renaissance · Baroque
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Landscape with Saint John on Patmos
- Artist
- Nicolas Poussin (French, 1594–1665)
- Date
- 1640
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 100.3 × 136.4 cm (39 1/2 × 53 5/8 in.); Framed: 128.3 × 164.5 × 12.1 cm (50 1/2 × 64 3/4 × 4 3/4 in.)
- Credit line
- A. A. Munger Collection
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.