Nicolas Poussin - The Inspiration of the Poet (L'ispirazione del poeta)

      The painting depicts Apollo, accompanied by infant Cupids and by one of the Muses, about to crown a poet who is writing under his inspiration. It is not known to what the painting alludes, nor what is its exact subject. Perhaps the latter was always indefinite, because the picture appears in Mazarin's inventory of 1653 as Apollo with a Muse and a Poet crowned with Laurels. Its warm colouring reveals the Titianesque strain in Poussin's work; it must have been painted during his first Roman period, at the end of the 1620s. Some critics put forward the hypothesis that the model for the Muse, often recognizable in other works of this period by Poussin, may have been Anna Dughet, whom he married in 1630 at San Lorenzo in Lucina (Rome).