The Plague of Ashdod, also known as The Miracle of the Ark in the Temple of Dagon, is a large history painting by the French Baroque master Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), painted around 1630–1631 while he was working in Rome. It illustrates a scene from the First Book of Samuel, in which the Philistines, having captured the Ark of the Covenant and installed it in the temple of their god Dagon at Ashdod, are struck by plague while the idol of Dagon is found toppled before it. Poussin composed the scene during an actual outbreak of plague in Italy, giving its crowded, architectural composition an unusually vivid sense of civic disaster and divine judgment. The painting is one of Poussin's most admired early Roman history paintings and hangs today in the Louvre in Paris.
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