Word: poussins
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Today, 300 years after his death, a recent critical biography -by the U.S.'s most venerable art historian, Walter Friedlaender, 93, sums up Poussin's continuing appeal. One conclusion is that his frankly intellectual art is just as much a visible feast as it is brain food...
Nothing to Chance. For all his discipline, Poussin was in no sense a stony prude or a bloodless geometrist. He reveled in depicting bacchanalia where swarthy satyrs lurched after alabaster-skinned nymphs, and chubby putti chugged wine as if it were rosy Pablum -all composed as carefully as a ballet. In his Rape of the Sabine Women (see opposite page), swords and outflung arms set up triangles that play a counterpoint against the squarish architecture. Nothing is left to chance, not even the suggestive but studied pas de deux of the Sabine maidens and their Roman abductors...
...nature forces me to search for well-ordered things," said Poussin, and he found his order in Greco-Roman antiquity. Of provincial birth in Normandy, he was not able until the age of 30 to get to Rome, the world's art capital during his lifetime. There he sketched ancient ruins, read the classic Latin poetry of Ovid, dissected cadavers to learn anatomy, copied the works of Raphael...
Never Too Exuberant. Finally, in 1627 a commission from a cardinal made Poussin's name. King Louis XIII pressured him into returning to paint for the glory of France. Under the orders of Cardinal Richelieu, Poussin was pestered with jobs to do what he called "mere bagatelles"-fireplaces, frontispiece designs, cabinet decor. After two years of royal daubing in France, he fled for good to Rome, where he quietly painted what he pleased until his death...
Unlike the exuberant, often excessive Italian baroque artists around him, Poussin stripped his paintings down to cool, hard, brightly colored figures gesturing like stagecraft as he recounted his fables. The narrative content of his art instantly made him a mentor for dull academic followers who found cartooning easier than esthetics. But he alone knew how to manifest the inward emotions of his mythical people in outward physical postures. While Narcissus, for example, gazes in the rapturous vanity of youth at his own reflection in a pool, his forgotten lover Echo, is depicted in ashen tones and fuzzy contours...