The Holy Family on the Steps
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.
The file this print is made from
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About this painting
Nothing here sits where it fell. Mary's head is the apex of a pyramid, and Cleveland reads the geometric organisation as the argument for the Holy Family's place in the redemption. Joseph sits apart, holding the compass of his trade, read also as the sign of God the Father.
Inside that scheme, John the Baptist offers an apple, the fruit of the Fall, and the Christ Child reaches for it, prefiguring the Crucifixion. The stair is the one tradition calls Mary's stairway to heaven. Poussin worked the light out too, with wax models in a box pierced with holes.
Sources: Smarthistory, Nicolas Poussin, Holy Family on the Steps · The Cleveland Museum of Art, object record 1981.18 · The Cleveland Museum of Art, object record 1981.18 (print view)
And he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was subject to them. And his mother kept all these words in her heart.
Luke 2:51 · Douay-Rheims (Challoner), from the project’s own corpus at data/bible_drc.js
Printed on demand. Public-domain masterwork, reproduced from a 6,000 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.