Marc Fumaroli Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2001
In 1657 Nicolas Poussin painted a shrine commissioned by Bishop Rospigliosi. The shrine was to give thanks to St Françoise of Rome, protector of Rome, for the end of a plague epidemic which had recently ravaged the city. Who else but Poussin could have given such dramatic tension, poetry and religious fervour to this strange picture where we see a noblewoman, a symbol of Rome, on her knees receiving word from the saint that the danger had passed?