Carlo Cesare Malvasia, the biographer of Bolognese painters, here refers to the studio of Francesco Albani. But one suspects that he could just as readily be describing Nicolas Poussin, whose copy of Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata must have been similarly battered from affectionate overuse. While generally considered the greatest French painter of the seventeenth century, Poussin (1594–1665) spent nearly his entire career in Rome, where he absorbed its artistic and literary heritage. Along with the self-evident inspiration of antiquity and Raphael, Tasso's renowned epic stimulated Poussin's pictorial muse and his singular commitment to narrative painting. Torquato Tasso (1544–95) was the foremost poet of the Late Renaissance.