L'Aveuglement des habitants de Sodome

"L'Aveuglement des habitants de Sodome" of 1639 depicts the episode from Genesis 19 in which the angels visiting Lot strike the men of Sodom with blindness when they attempt to seize and abuse the divine messengers. The subject was unusual in the history of painting — far less frequently depicted than Lot's flight or the destruction of Sodom — and La Hyre's choice of this specific moment suggests either a learned patron requesting an uncommon subject or his own interest in the dramatic visual possibilities of sudden collective blindness as a form of divine judgment. The blinding miracle offered a compositional opportunity analogous to the Conversion of Saint Paul: figures struck down or rendered helpless by supernatural intervention, their physical incapacity marking a threshold between worldly intention and divine will. La Hyre painted the work in 1639, two years after his Conversion of Saint Paul, and may have been consciously extending his exploration of divine blinding as a compositional theme. The Louvre's acquisition of this work makes it one of the more unusual subjects in French seventeenth-century religious painting accessible to the public.

The collective blinding of the Sodomites posed a compositional challenge of organising multiple figures in varying stages of disorientation, confusion, and helplessness — a crowd scene dominated not by action but by its sudden cessation. La Hyre differentiates figures by their degree of blindness and the direction of their disoriented movement, creating a visual cacophony of interrupted intentions. The angels, either withdrawing or standing firm within Lot's house, provide the composition's stable vertical element against the falling and flailing horizontal disorder.