The Magical Painting of Poussin - The New York Review of Books Annotated

Volume 55, Number 6 · April 17, 2008

The Magical Painting of Poussin

By Andrew Butterfield

Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions

An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, February 12–May 11, 2008.

Catalog of the exhibition edited by Pierre Rosenberg and Keith Christiansen.
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 414 pp., $65.00; $45.00 (paper)

Nicolas Poussin has been studied and celebrated for more than three hundred years, and yet “Poussin and Nature,” now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the first show dedicated to his work as a landscape painter. It is a ravishingly beautiful exhibition, and one that attempts to renew our understanding of the artist.

It has been common of late to regard Poussin as a kind of abstract philosopher. As presented in the exhibition, he comes across instead as an inspired poet. And like great poetry what his pictures demand—and what they reward—is serious engagement.

The show opens with paintings from Poussin’s early years in Rome. All the pictures in this section are scenes from classical myth and literature, and many seem to be set in Arcadia, an imaginary place of love and song celebrated by Virgil and other ancient writers. In these paintings the landscape elements are chiefly in the background, and yet their lustrous beauty is fundamental to establishing their dreamy mood.

Poussin took an intense interest in recreating the appearance of ancient paintings. To this end he often based his figures on classical sculpture and included evocations of the few remaining fragments of Roman landscape painting. He strove, too, for perfect accuracy in depicting the details of classical and early Christian costume, ritual, comportment, and architecture.

Yet it is important to see in this activity not only a desire for scientific exactitude; it also has the poignancy of reaching for an unattainable ideal.

More than any other visual artist since Titian in the early sixteenth century, Poussin combined the antiquarian dream of recapturing classical painting with the yearning for the mythic Golden Age in order to make serious art of real emotional intensity.

Poussin combined the antiquarian dream of recapturing classical painting with the yearning for the mythic Golden Age in order to make serious art of real emotional intensity.

Joshua Reynolds, William Hazlitt, and Kenneth Clark have each compared Poussin with the epic grandeur of Milton

Poussin contemplated human character and natural order in search of the essential and the eternal.