Nicolas Pousin's Landscape Allegories - Review

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 212 pp.; 8 color ills., 41 b/w. $70.00

"Perhaps the subtlest art exhibition in New York City at the moment," so one could read in the New York Times on Wednesday, October 22, 1997, "is the single painting by Nicolas Poussin hanging, on loan from the Louvre, in the Frick Collection."(1) How often are Old Master paintings the subject for newspaper editorials? Poussin, never a popular painter - there was no crowd in front of The Arcadian Shepherds when I visited the Frick - always has been much favored by connoisseurs. No other Old Master has received such sustained close attention over so long a period from what, in a suitably old-fashioned turn of phrase, might be called "art lovers." Unlike most of his Roman contemporaries - the Baroque artists who became very unfashionable in the 19th-century - Poussin never ceased to fascinate collectors and so has never needed to be rediscovered. His admirers usually identify him as a very French artist. Perhaps that is why in December 1994 the Grand Palais retrospective was full of visitors every day at all times. I cannot imagine that this exhibition would have been as crowded in New York.

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

What makes Poussin's paintings almost unique is the methodological problems posed by the history of their interpretation. His art is an iconographer's paradise, and much of the literature is devoted to debates about the exact significance of paintings such as The Arcadian Shepherds. Rubens was more erudite; other 17th-century painters and printers created obscurer images. But although only a minority of Poussin's paintings pose obvious puzzles, there is a long-standing tendency for most of his champions to treat his art as highly esoteric. Some other Old Masters - Piero della Francesca or Caravaggio, for example - have been analyzed recently in almost equally complex ways. But such accounts cannot appeal to biographical information, for relatively little is known about the lives of these artists. With Poussin, by contrast, we have a great deal of biographical evidence from his letters and from art writers who knew him - evidence that present-day art historians who analyze his paintings in highly esoteric ways inevitably must override.

Very often Poussin scholars seek the most complex possible readings of his words (and art); after all, he was the philosopher-painter. In To Destroy Painting, for example, Louis Marin says that "The Arcadian Shepherds recounts, in what is at once a musical and plastic manner, the moment when the song of the origin is interrupted, the silent moment when history intrudes upon the scene."(3) This very elaborate analysis seems to me but the fanciful play of a great scholar. Marin's book has been much praised, so the problem here must be mine. After proposing a highly subtle relationship between Poussin and Caravaggio, Marin stops to ask if when Andre Felibien said "Poussin could not bear Caravaggio and said that he had come into the world in order to destroy 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 own best critic.

Why should we not give special authority to commentators who knew Poussin or were near contemporaries? What justifies highly complex 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 some of Poussin's paintings; another, that the sheer weight of this long tradition of Poussin commentary may influence how we now see his art. Very interesting evidence about the interpretative tradition is provided by an appendix to Richard Beresford's "A Dance to the Music of Time" by Nicolas Poussin, which summarizes the literature from 1672 to 1994 devoted to this painting.(4) When Beresford presents 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 so much verbal evidence. "Very few of those who saw the picture," Beresford claims in presenting his own interpretation, "can have had any very clear notion of its meaning" (p. 51). No doubt the details are obscure, in ways that his discussion clarifies usefully, but the idea that "wealth enjoyed to excess will ultimately lead to poverty" (p. 59) is neither obscure nor esoteric.