The warm sun pulls water in vaporous trails across the landscape to form rain clouds that will release to rehydrate the soil and nourish life. This perpetual cycle forms an ecosystem so tightly integrated that no single element can be understood in isolation or altered without consequences. Poussin envisions that as subtext for a complex ancient Greek myth about a giant named Orion who sought the sun’s rays to heal his eyes. Born to three fathers whom commentators in Poussin’s time connected with personifications of Air, Water, and the Sun, Orion was imagined as a miraculous living cloud destined to be memorialized after his death as a constellation.