The Holy Family on the Steps

The Holy Family on the Steps gathers the Virgin and Child with Joseph and the young Saint John the Baptist before an arcade of marble and sky, a scene carried out in the grave, disciplined manner of the great French classicist. Completed in 1648 and long among the most admired of Nicolas Poussin’s sacred subjects, the picture builds the composition on a cool architecture of horizontals, diagonals, and clear primaries—an object lesson in the pictorial reason he prized. Every form is weighed and fitted, so that the figures seem to inhabit a universe of perfect order sustained by divine grace.