Nicolas Poussin: The Seven Sacraments

This groundbreaking volume by an eminent art historian explores the master of French classicism’s most famous series of religious paintings.

For more than fifty years, renowned art historian Pierre Rosenberg has studied the work of Nicolas Poussin, one of the greatest painters of the seventeenth century. In this landmark volume, Rosenberg offers a detailed examination of the fourteen paintings in Poussin’s two Seven Sacraments series, which occupied the artist for almost fifteen years.

Poussin’s work combines mythology, moral allegory, and religious history. From his arrival in Rome in 1624, he explored biblical themes such as the Holy Family, continually returning to this motif with ever-deepening insight. Thanks to his fascination with these subjects, his paintings reveal both his intellectual rigor and his gift for dramatic storytelling, converging faith, history, and imagination.

The two Sacraments cycles, commissioned by Cassiano dal Pozzo and Paul Fréart de Chantelou, exemplify Poussin’s revolutionary and innovative style. Each series comprises seven independent compositions—an unprecedented and radical approach for the time—illustrating episodes from the lives of Christ, the Virgin, and the first Christians, while reflecting the Catholic Church’s post-Tridentine emphasis on the sacraments.

Shedding new light on these iconic series, this volume reveals how the leading French seventeenth-century religious painter transformed sacred themes into enduring visual poetry.