Nicolas Poussin's early biographer, his friend Giovanni…

Nicolas Poussin's early biographer, his friend Giovanni Pietro Bellori, relates that Poussin had been born near Les Andelys in Normandy and that he had received an education that included some Latin, which would stand him in good stead.

Early sketches had attracted the notice of Quentin Varin, a local painter, whose pupil Poussin became, until he ran away to Paris at the age of eighteen.

There he entered the studios of the Flemish painter Ferdinand Elle and then of Georges Lallemand, both minor masters now remembered for having tutored Poussin.

He found French art in a stage of transition: the old apprenticeship system was disturbed, and the academic training destined to supplant it was not yet established by Simon Vouet; but having met Courtois the mathematician, Poussin had been fired by the study of his collection of engravings by Marcantonio Raimondi after Italian masters.

After two abortive attempts to reach Rome, he had fallen in with Giambattista Marino, the court poet to Marie de Medici, at Lyon.

Marino had employed him on illustrations to his poem Adone (untraced) and on a series of illustrations for a projected edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, taken him into his household, and in 1624 enables Poussin (who had been detained by commissions in Lyon and Paris) to rejoin him at Rome.

It has been suggested that it was this early friendship with Marino, and the commissioning of illustrations of his poetry (which drew on Ovidian themes), that founded, or at least reinforced, the prominent eroticism in Poussin's early work.

Poussin is thirty when he arrives in Rome.

At first he lodges with Simon Vouet.

Through Marino, he had been introduced to Marcello Sacchetti who in turn had introduced him to another of his early patrons, Cardinal Francesco Barberini.