The Martyrdom of St. Erasmus was painted by Nicholas Poussin, a French painter, in the year of 1628. Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) was an important painter of the French Baroque period and and the founder of French classical painting in 17th century. He admired Renaissance masters Raphael and Titian, and was obsessed with the study of Greek and Roman cultural heritage. Most of Poussin 's works are based on myth, history, and religious stories. Although it is not large, it is meticulously crafted. It strives for rigorous sketches and perfect composition. The figure is sleek and elegant as well as full of sculpture. The work is always conceived with seriousness and philosophizing, which is characterized by his calm and lofty artistic features. If French national paintings were formed in the 17th century, Poussin can be described as “The Father of French painting." He has completed quantity of works in his life, The Martyrdom of St. Erasmus, an altarpiece for the Church of St. Petersburg, which is one of his famous works.
The Martyrdom of St Erasmus is the first public work of Nicolas Poussin in Rome, where the French painter
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The green hills and the roads that run between them have been identified with the rolling countryside around Leuven. The brilliance of the light and colours in which nature is rendered here is so extraordinary that one feels this must be the result of the first-ever exercise in open-air painting. Bouts was a master of landscape art, as his contemporary Johannus Molanus was already aware. Even such a brutal subject as the disemboweling of Erasmus, when cloaked in Bouts 's ethereal light, is invested with a certain tranquility. Nature is no longer an artificial decor, an obviously false theatrical backdrop, as it appears in 15th century Italian painting, but an atmosphere rendered down to the finest detail, where close attention has been paid to every nuance of