The Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus

Poussin painted The Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus around 1628, his first major Roman public commission, produced for a chapel in St. Peter's Basilica. The large altarpiece depicting the torture and execution of Saint Erasmus — his intestines being wound out of his body on a windlass — required Poussin to work at a scale and with a theatricality quite different from the smaller, more intimate works for private collectors that formed his usual market. The composition shows the influence of Domenichino and Guido Reni, who had produced notable altarpieces for Roman churches in the preceding decade, while already demonstrating the classical figure organization and emotional restraint that would characterize his mature style.

The monumental composition struggles with the tension between Baroque dynamism and Poussin's classicizing instincts, though the figure of Erasmus on the torture rack is rendered with powerful anatomical precision.