Word: poussins
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...Impressionists. Corot's career began in the 1820s, at a time when classical landscape--the ideal scene with temples, ruins and mellow boscage, populated by figures out of Ovid's Metamorphoses or Vergil's Georgics--was still very much a part of French art. Its greatest exponents, Nicolas Poussin and Lorrain, were French, and their work still cast a long shadow. But it existed alongside a newer appetite for natural vision, the direct recording of the facts of landscape, whose wellhead was the English artist John Constable...
...Poussin, the real contained the ideal. He did not generalize like an academic classicist. His paintings are full of precisely observed detail -- pebbles and flowers, plants and springs of water. The atmosphere in which forms are bathed is real, whether it's the blue silken light of spring in the Roman campagna or the thick darkness that envelops a landscape when a storm gathers and lightning strikes. (The dramatic mystery of Poussin's foul-weather scenes carries you back to Giorgione's Tempesta.) The architecture of his backgrounds evokes a perfect antiquity, embedded in Nature but not disfigured by Time...
...Poussin also found a special relationship between architecture and the human body. On his return to France, Poussin visited Nimes (as Thomas Jefferson would, 150 years later) to admire its Roman temple, the so-called Maison Carree. "The beautiful girls you will have seen at Nimes," he wrote to Chantelou, "will not, I am sure, delight your spirits less than the sight of the beautiful columns ... since the latter are only ancient copies of the former." One of his finest late paintings, Eliezer and Rebecca, 1649, was conceived in exactly this spirit. Nowhere, perhaps, in 17th century painting is there...
...passion and thought. In this he was absolutely French -- the contemporary of Pierre Corneille, whose tragedies revolved around ideas of free will, exemplary virtue and conflicts between desire and duty, enacted by characters from a classical past who spoke ardently and directly to a 17th century audience. Rome made Poussin; but after him, Rome could no longer condescend to Paris. By the time of his death, he had helped create an irreversible shift in the cultural balance of Europe...
...paintings of Poussin challenge modern eyes...