Poussin not only studied every vestige of antiquity at Rome and in its
environs, with the greatest assiduity while young, but he followed this
practice through life. It was his delight to spend every hour he could
spare at the different villas in the neighborhood of Rome, where,
besides the most beautiful remains of antiquity, he enjoyed the
unrivalled landscape which surrounds that city, so much dignified by the
noble works of ancient days, that every hill is classical, the very
trees have a poetic air, and everything combines to excite in the soul a
kind of dreaming rapture from which it would not be awakened, and which
those who have not felt it can scarcely understand.
He restored the antique temples, and made plans and accurate drawings of
the fragments of ancient Rome; and there are few of his pictures, where
the subject admits of it, in which we may not trace the buildings, both
of the ancient and the modern city. In the beautiful landscape of the
death of Eurydice, the bridge and castle of St. Angelo, and the tower,
commonly called that of Nero, form the middle ground of the picture. The
castle of St. Angelo appears again in one of his pictures of the
Exposing of Moses; and the pyramid of Caius Cestius, the Pantheon, the
ruins of the Forum, and the walls of Rome, may be recognised in the
Finding of Moses, and several others of his remarkable pictures.
"I have often admired," said Vigneul de Marville, who knew him at a late
period of his life, "the love he had for his art. Old as he was, I
frequently saw him among the ruins of ancient Rome, out in the Campagna,
or along the banks of the Tyber, sketching a scene which had pleased
him; and I often met him with his handkerchief full of stones, moss, or
flowers, which he carried home, that he might copy them exactly from
nature. One day I asked him, how he had attained to such a degree of
perfection as to have gained so high a rank among the great painters of
Italy? He answered, '_I have neglected nothing!_'"