Nicolas Pousin's Landscape Allegories - Review

Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 1996 212 pp; 8 color ills., 41 b/w $7000

"Perhaps the subtlest art exhibition in of recent origin York City at the moment" for a like reason one could read in the fresh York Times on Wednesday, October 22 1997 "is the single painting by means of Nicolas Poussin hanging, on loan from the Louvre in the Frick Collection."(1) in what manner often are Old Master paintings the control for newspaper editorials? Poussin, not ever a popular painter - there was no horde in front of The Arcadian Shepherds when I visited the Frick - always has been a great deal of favored by connoisseurs. No other elderly Master has received such sustained shut up attention over so long a period from what, in a suitably old-fashioned move round of phrase, might be called "art lovers" Unlike greatest in quantity of his Roman contemporaries - the Baroque artists who became true unfashionable in the 19th-century - Poussin not at any time ceased to fascinate collectors and thus has never needed to be rediscovered. His admirers usually identify him as a true French artist. Perhaps that is for what cause [i]or[/i] reason in December 1994 the Grand Palais retrospective was filled of visitors every day at all times. I cannot imagine that this exhibition would have been as concourseed in New York.

Predictably, the first full-scale Poussin exhibition since 1960 provided the occasion to rethink questions about connoisseurship, to not absent new archival evidence, and to debate the older interpretations of his art. It also became the occasion for the appearance of several fresh books about him. Since then, a number of additional publications - more than I have the time or ability to survey completely (and I will not discuss the periodical literature) - have appeared.(2)

What makes Poussin's paintings almost unique is the methodological question s posed by the history of their interpretation. His art is an iconographer's paradise, and a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the literature is devot to debates about the exact significance of paintings of that kind as The Arcadian Shepherds. Rubens was more erudite; other 17th-century painters and printers created obscurer images. on the contrary although only a minority of Poussin's paintings artificial position obvious puzzles, there is a long-standing bias for most of his champions to treat his art as highly esoteric. a certain number of other Old Masters - Piero della Francesca or Caravaggio, for example - have been analyzed not long ago in almost equally complex ways. on the other hand such accounts cannot appeal to biographical information, for relatively little is known about the lives of these artists. With Poussin, through contrast, we have a great deal of biographical evidence from his alphabetic characters and from art writers who knew him - evidence that present-day art historians who analyze his paintings in highly esoteric ways inevitably must override.

true often Poussin scholars seek the greatest in quantity complex possible readings of his words (and art); after all, he was the philosopher-painter. In To pull down Painting, for example, Louis Marin says that "The Arcadian Shepherds repeats in what is at one time a musical and plastic manner, the trice when the song of the origin is interrupted, the silent trice when history intrudes upon the scene"(3) This actual elaborate analysis seems to me on the contrary the fanciful play of a great scholar. Marin's work has been much praised, in the way that the problem here must be mine. After proposing a highly artful relationship between Poussin and Caravaggio, Marin stops to ask if when Andre Felibien said "Poussin could not bear Caravaggio and said that he had advance into the world in order to overthrow painting," he did not mean something simple. "It could be argued that my interpretation . . is obviously excessive, the point being that Felibien simply intended to say that Poussin did not like - absolutely did not like - Caravaggio's work" (p 109) Marin is his hold best critic.

on what account should we not give special authority to commentators who knew Poussin or were near contemporaries? What justifies highly compounded modern interpretations? One answer to these questions is that 17th-century writers could not speak frankly about the perhaps heretical views of politics and religion in a certain number of of Poussin's paintings; another, that the sheer weight of this drawn out tradition of Poussin commentary may influence in what manner we now see his art. actual interesting evidence about the interpretative tradition is provided by the agency of an appendix to Richard Beresford's "A Dance to the Music of Time" through Nicolas Poussin, which summarizes the literature from 1672 to 1994 devot to this painting.(4) When Beresford not absents the commentaries of Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Andre Felibien, John Smith, Walter Friedlaender, Erwin Panofsky, Anthony Powell, Denis Mahon, and many other writers, it becomes difficult to disregard with equal reason much verbal evidence. "Very hardly any of those who saw the picture," Beresford claims in presenting his have interpretation, "can have had any actual clear notion of its meaning" (p 51) No doubt the details are dim in ways that his discussion clarifies usefully, on the contrary the idea that "wealth derive pleasure fromed to excess will ultimately lead to poverty" (p 59) is neither rayless nor esoteric.