Poussin Before Rome: 1594-1624 - Review

London: Richard L Feigen and Co 1995 119 pp; 6 color ills., 42 b/w $7000

"Perhaps the subtlest art exhibition in novel York City at the moment" thus one could read in the novel 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 subdue for newspaper editorials? Poussin, not ever a popular painter - there was no multitude 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 actual unfashionable in the 19th-century - Poussin not ever ceased to fascinate collectors and with equal reason has never needed to be rediscovered. His admirers usually identify him as a actual French artist. Perhaps that is for what cause [i]or[/i] reason in December 1994 the Grand Palais retrospective was replete of visitors every day at all times. I cannot imagine that this exhibition would have been as thronged in New York.

Predictably, the first full-scale Poussin exhibition since 1960 provided the occasion to rethink questions about connoisseurship, to near 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 suitableness to survey completely (and I will not discuss the periodical literature) - have appeared.(2)

What makes Poussin's paintings almost unique is the methodological point in disputes posed by the history of their interpretation. His art is an iconographer's paradise, and abundant of the literature is devot to debates about the exact significance of paintings of the like kind as The Arcadian Shepherds. Rubens was more erudite; other 17th-century painters and printers created obscurer images. on the other hand although only a minority of Poussin's paintings artificial position obvious puzzles, there is a long-standing proclivity 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 contrary such accounts cannot appeal to biographical information, for relatively little is known about the lives of these artists. With Poussin, by dint of 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.

real 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 break up Painting, for example, Louis Marin says that "The Arcadian Shepherds narrates in what is at one time a musical and plastic manner, the jiffy when the song of the origin is interrupted, the silent jiffy 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 volume has been much praised, for a like reason the problem here must be mine. After proposing a highly crooked relationship between Poussin and Caravaggio, Marin stops to ask if when Andre Felibien said "Poussin could not bear Caravaggio and said that he had draw near into the world in order to ruin 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 have 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 lengthy tradition of Poussin commentary may influence by what mode we now see his art. true 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" by dint of Nicolas Poussin, which summarizes the literature from 1672 to 1994 devot to this painting.(4) When Beresford not aways 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 in the way that much verbal evidence. "Very hardly any of those who saw the picture," Beresford claims in presenting his have interpretation, "can have had any real clear notion of its meaning" (p 51) No doubt the details are sombre in ways that his discussion clarifies usefully, on the other hand the idea that "wealth derive pleasure fromed to excess will ultimately lead to poverty" (p 59) is neither dusky nor esoteric.