Eudamidas’ testamente

Eudamidas of Corinth was poor, and when he came to die he had nothing to leave his mother and his daughter but his friends. His testament named two wealthy Corinthians, Areteus and Charixenus, as his heirs on the condition that each provide for one of the two women, and when Charixenus himself died soon afterwards Areteus took on both. Lucian’s anecdote was one of the stories the seventeenth century read as proof that friendship could be a philosophical virtue rather than a feeling, and Nicolas Poussin painted it in the middle of his Roman maturity, about 1644–48, as a demonstration of how such a scene should be built. The dying man dictates his will to a scribe; a physician stands by, one hand laid on his patient’s body and his mind visibly elsewhere; the daughter buries her face. Every figure is stated in clear contour and local colour, and the pathos is administered rather than released — which is exactly what Poussin (1594–1665) was admired for: the painter-philosopher of the century, working in Rome while the sensory, theatrical Baroque dominated everywhere else, and holding to a language of lucid drawing and measured gesture. The composition was engraved by J. Pesne and again, in 1832, by Erling Eckersberg, and a smaller copy hangs in the Hermitage; the gallery’s picture entered the collection in 1931.