The death of Germanicus - Poussin

According to the conventions of classical history painting, the painting is supposed to stage Germanicus' speech as imagined by Tacitus in Book II of the Annals. Here, however, the speech appears to be over. Poussin has chosen the moment when Germanicus has just expired, poisoned by Pison and Plancine. He depicts the various reactions of the audience after the event. In the right foreground, his wife Agrippina, surrounded by her children, veils her face in despair, in a gesture whose iconographic tradition goes back to Timante's Agamemnon, veiling his face before the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia. On the left, Germanicus' soldiers are divided between sadness on the left and revolt on the right: in the center, one of them raises his right arm, attesting to the gods that his general will be avenged.