Word: poussins
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...came together in Rome, where Poussin spent most of his life. Born in Normandy in 1594 (his father was a military officer, his mother an alderman's daughter), he was educated, probably by Jesuits, in Paris, and turned to painting before he was 20. A chance encounter with Giambattista Marino, the floridly precious Neapolitan poet who had taken political asylum at the Paris court of Marie de Medicis, led to introductions in Rome, and he went there in 1624. From then until his death in 1665, Poussin returned to France only once, for a brief two years (1640-42), during...
...connoisseurs as Cassiano del Pozzo or Cardinal Barberini, for whom he painted his supreme utterance about Roman political virtue, The Death of Germanicus, 1628. Above all, there were the traces of ancient Rome, a buried organism whose disarrayed bones protruded everywhere: columns, capitals, broken herms, arches, battle sarcophaguses, furnishing Poussin with a repertoire of prototypes to which his imagination would ceaselessly return. Poussin had to live in Rome in order to become the leading French painter of his age, changing the status of French art from afar by the gravitational force of his own achievements...
...groundwork for those achievements is recorded in Poussin's drawings. Though only a fraction of these works survives, Poussin the draftsman rewards all the attention you can give him. This is so despite the fact that he never seems to have done a highly finished demonstration drawing, a show of virtuosity for others, such as was common among other 17th century artists. All his drawings were for his own use, memory aids or steps toward a finished composition, and they don't bother with seducing the eye. They are pragmatic expressions of the desire to understand a pose...
...Poussin wanted to reconstitute antiquity in his paintings by grasping its root: energy. Always in his best work there are the signs of overflowing vitality, constrained by form's superego, the mode -- tragic, idyllic, epic, sacred. The Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, 1638, is such a painting. % Poussin based it on a classical source -- Flavius Josephus' account of the sack of Jerusalem by the Emperor Titus and his army. Its obvious formal prototype is the Roman battle sarcophagus, with figures arrayed in a frieze; its pictorial roots, expressed in the nobly articulated figures of enslaved Jews and conquering centurions...
...pressure of both mystery and reality that makes Poussin so unacademic. He was an idealist. The world he painted, in all its mythographic richness, was not fallen. Neither sin nor decay was part of it. The young man in The Inspiration of the Poet, circa 1631, glancing upward while the imperious hand of Apollo redirects his attention to the text in his hand and the muse Calliope gives him a level look of benign assessment, might as well be Poussin himself. The allegory unfolds in a luminous calm but is grounded by discreet observation: the relaxed pose of Apollo...