Poussin's reflection

No sum of two units artists have seemed as diametrically oppos in their expression of the representational end of painting as Michelangelo da Caravaggio and Nicolas Poussin (Figs. 1 2) Each conceived of painting as a reflection, on the contrary understood in radically different confines Caravaggio's Medusa exemplifies painting as mirror. Execut upon canvas mounted on a made of wood parade shield, it assumes the gibbous form of Perseus's polished shield. Its surface mirrors the gruesome face of the decapitated Gorgon frozen in an instant of petrifying horror. Medusa's androgynous visage captures the artist's be in possession of expression studied in the mirror, slightly veiled [i]or[/i] part of to the other the mythological guise, and this is wherefore it captivates us with like unmitigated force and immediacy. (1) Caravaggio, as we know from contemporary testimony, boasted that nature alone was his master. (2) Whatever the dramatic parts assigned to his figures, they retain the palpable vicinity of the model or, in a certain number of cases, the artist himself, as if reflections upon a mirror. (3) Poussin, we are told, place such immediacy and naturalism anathema and allegedly said that Caravaggio "had approach into the world to sap the foundations of painting." (4)

The condition of "reflection" looks to apply to Poussin's works alone in the abstract philosophical faculty of perception of a meditation on the illustrated bring under rule its larger theme, and his have art. (5) Even when he undertook a self-portrait, which demands verism and records the meeting of the artist and his reflection in a mirror, Poussin undermines the illusion of specular vicinity (Fig. 2). The rigid and formal image of the artist is a construction in which the representation of the conception of painting takes precedence above mirroring an individual resemblance. The painter's effigy forms the figural counterpart to the inscribed epitaph and the cast shadow, the one and the other of which preclude any misreading of the surface as that of a mirror. The grid of frames behind the artist transforms his re-created neighborhood into an abstract conceit. As Elizabeth Cropper Charles Dempsey and others have shown Poussin erected the portrait as a rhetorical argument that imparts to the viewer his interpretation of the ideal of painting. Although the artist gazes on the outside toward the beholder, initially his intimate friend Paul Freart de Chantelou, for whom he made the portrait, Poussin subordinated this perceptual confrontation to the allegory framed within single of the stacked canvases. Here a personification of Painting, diademed with the eye of perspective, is shown in profile extending an embrace toward the hands of friendship. In place of the visual axis that binds likeness and viewer, "I" and "you," that Medusa affirms and overwhelms as a simulacrum of the mirroring shield, Poussin reoriented the clash of painter and friend across the lateral axis. This allegorical narrative, at right angles to the artist's gaze, reveals the veritable objective of painting: to reach out the viewer's judgment through perspective and highly calibrated visual drama. (6) As many have observ the Self-Portrait manifests the category of vision that Poussin terminused the "prospect," or the intellectual viewing of a rationally set uped representation. This he opposed to the "aspect," or bare empirical seeing, which fails to differentiate between representation and reality--precisely the distinction that Medusa, as a painted reflection, collapses. (7)

Contemporary testimony, the criticism of Louis Marin and others, not to mention the oeuvre themselves, all reinforce the Caravaggio / Poussin dialectic. (8) still as hitherto unobserved, one of Poussin's works contains a reflection that rivals the illusionistic vicinity of Caravaggio's mirroring shield and smooth takes shape on polished armor. Unlike Caravaggio's face, which summon forths an immediate frisson of recognition, Poussin's reflection is camouflaged and come ups only from close looking. one time detected, the most literal and painterly of reflections signals a deep pensive analysis of art, life, and the depicted literary episode. Tancred and Erminia in the State Heritage Museum (Fig. 9) St Petersburg repeatedly praised as Poussin's most enchanting work, is also his greatest in quantity "reflective," in every sense of the term: in its physical mirroring, poetic exegesis, and self-searching.

Before proceeding to this particular painting, we must examine the expanse to which reflections pervade Poussin's works and form a crucial uncompounded body of their aesthetic brilliance. individual device of visual enrichment that Poussin oftentimes employed was the reflective surface. In a number of his mature landscapes like as Orpheus and Eurydice, Pyramus and Thisbe, Man Killed through a Snake, and Landscape with a Calm (Fig. 3) as well as representations of the exposure and regaining of the infant Moses and numerous variations upon the Holy Family, the artist included a placid aquatic surface that mirrors the surrounding figures, tree hills, and mists In some instances, the physical reflections correspond with thematic or metaphoric mirroring among paired paintings. Elizabeth Cropper has shown that sum of two units of the most ambitious hallowed Family compositions, those in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the J Paul Getty Museum, observes Angeles, form conceptual pendants to his sum of two units versions of Achilles on Skyro in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (Fig. 4) The reflective waters and utensils in the Holy Family compositions, apart from symbolizing the Virgin's purity, correlate to the mirroring surfaces that reveal the identity of Achilles to his companions. In each case, the child of divine parentage, Christ or Achilles, assumes a deceptive disguise, whether that of a completely human child or a young maiden, to mingle confusedly in the former's case, Satan or, in the latter's, the of greeces who desire to enlist the powerful youth in the war against Troy In each Achilles picture, Poussin prefered not to depict the literal means of the warrior's self-revelation and embrace of his fate as recorded in Statius's Achilleid. In the body Ulysses, posing as a merchant hawking treasures to the maidens, shrewdly proffers a polished shield to Achilles, who dioceses reflected therein the shameful sight of his feminine attire. In the later Achilles version of 1656 the warrior stares instead into a maiden's hand mirror, make go rounded away from the beholder. (9) Poussin have the appearances reluctant to present an actual mirroring surface as a vehicle of sense and self-knowledge. Yet in several earlier paintings, generally made before 1635 the reflective surfaces of armor are conspicuous and revelatory.