The Gathering of Manna
The original, as its museum records it
Every line above is reproduced from the holding institution’s own catalogue entry, which is linked. Where their title, date or attribution differs from ours, theirs is the one printed here.
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About this painting
The manna falls like snow — Poussin followed Josephus, not the plainer text — but the falling is the least of it. He told Jacques Stella he had found a distribution of attitudes: hunger, joy, admiration, reverence.
Le Brun found the Medici Wrestlers in two men fighting: violence and selfishness that keep them from seeing the manna spread underfoot. By contrast, a woman feeds her mother at the breast before her own child.
The Louvre reads the pierced rock as Christ, the spiritual rock of 1 Corinthians 10. In 1639 Poussin left an instruction: read the story and the picture.
Sources: Musée du Louvre, 'La Manne' (The Israelites Gathering the Manna in the Desert), INV 7275. · Commission history, dossier citing Anthony Blunt's catalogue raisonné (Phaidon) · 1 Corinthians 10:3-4, Douay-Rheims (Challoner).
And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another: Manhu! which signifieth: What is this! for they knew not what it was. And Moses said to them: This is the bread which the Lord hath given you to eat.
Exodus 16:15 · Douay-Rheims (Challoner), from the project’s own corpus at data/bible_drc.js
Printed on demand. Public-domain masterwork, reproduced from a 2,878 px master of the original. The whole image is printed — never cropped to fit the sheet — so every sheet carries an archival margin, and the dimensions and resolution listed above are the ones you receive.