In 1651 Nicolas Poussin (1596–1664) wrote to his friend in Paris, the painter, Jacques Stella (1596–1657), on the fundamental role of the storm in his composition Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe (1651, Städlisches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main), describing at length the exact meteorological effects he aimed at creating in his tale of Ovid’s star-crossed lovers (Met. IV). In the painting the distraught Thisbe rushes towards the supine Pyramus while lightning flashes in a dark, threatening sky and a raging storm tosses the leaves and limbs of trees, the whole conveying both nature's fury and Thisbe's emotional turmoil. It has been called an ‘ekphrastic masterpiece’, in which Poussin aimed to equal the mimetic abilities of two famous forerunners, the ancient Greek painter, Apelles, and the Renaissance master, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), whose recommendations for how to represent a land storm in his Trattato della pittura Poussin appears to have followed carefully. Poussin showed trees that Leonardo recommended should ‘bend to earth almost as though they wished to follow the course of the winds’, as well as meteorological effects such as ‘smoky clouds, which, struck by the sun's rays […] descend to earth, lighting it up with their beams’ and ‘infuriated bolts of lightning’ that illuminate ‘the shadowed countryside in various places’. Clearly Leonardo's text motivated Poussin to explore the possibilities of the land storm – a subject far less common than the storm at sea in mid-seventeenth-century Roman art – and inspired him to create one of his most memorable landscapes.