Of old, snakes have embodied conflicting hybridities that represent wisdom and deceit, danger and healing, redemption and destruction - an ambiguous iconography of 'good-and-evil' that manifests the polyvalent elements of the serpentine in art and other cultural practices.

Greatly inspired by Antique and Renaissance art, Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) spent most of his career in Rome. Depicting a man crushed by a massive snake lying in the shadow beside a stream, Poussin's painting (c 1648) at the National Gallery in London is a 'deathscape' in the most literal sense of the word. It was possibly inspired by a contemporary death-by-serpent in a snake-infested town south-east of Rome. While the canvas has been restored several times, the lurking shadow around the snake-curled man is now so deep that he is barely noticeable under its patina. Earlier engravings show the body more clearly, speaking to values of reproduction, copying, remedialisation and distribution.

Drawing comparison to the cultural history of ancient snake rituals and their contemporary remains, my paper will look at different 'photographic' approaches to depicting and defeating the fear-of-dying in relation to this painting. These include its 'time-based' composition of arrested expression gestures in contrast to silence and absence, fortuitous image constellations in condition reports as well as imaging techniques used to establish visual data to understand what's depicted beneath the darkening - with an excursus on 'bad photocopies' used by researchers to jog their visual memory and, in turn, their imagination.