Nicolas Poussin

1594-1665 • French • Painter • Baroque Classicism

" I neglected nothing." - Nicolas Poussin

Before he was 18, Poussin ran away from home to study art, an endeavor his parents disapproved of. He had two disappointing starts, then reached Rome at last in 1624, with the encouragement of the most famous Italian poet of his age, Giovanni Battista Marino. He worked in the studio of DOMENICHINO for a time. Poussin slowly became known, and was backed by Cassiano dal Pozzo, a cultivated and learned art PATRON with a passion for CLASSICAL antiquities. This Classical affinity grew in Poussin, too. In his earlier work Poussin had borrowed from and enriched his repertoire with references to artists such as TITIAN. Whether due to the poor reception of a major ALTARPIECE he had painted or because in 1629-30 he was ill with what was called the French sickness (venereal disease), when he recovered he changed his way of life as well as his style and subjects of painting. Pozzo, secretary to Cardinal Francesco BARBERINI, remained his client, but Poussin retired from competition for grand, public commissions for projects like churches and palaces. His pictures became smaller, more poetic, and increasingly Classical. Poussin spoke of the spectator "reading" his paintings: " ... just as the twenty-six letters of the alphabet serve to formulate our words and to express our thoughts, so the lineaments of the human body serve to express the soul's passions and to show outside what is in one's mind." To read Poussin is to read poses, gestures, and facial expression. Yet there is a stillness in his works that led BERNINI, gazing at one of Poussin's paintings, to exclaim, "What silence!" Poussin's figures seem frozen in place, like a tableau vivant. This is nowhere clearer than in his second version of Et in Arcadia Ego, painted c. 1655, during the peak of his accomplishments (an earlier version exists from c. 1628/29). It is a masterpiece of both stylistic clarity and interpretative enigma. What one superficially reads is that a stately woman and three shepherds are gathered at a tombstone in an ARCADIAN setting where they are reading the tombstone's inscription (also the title of the painting), the ambiguous words I, too, in Arcadia or, Even in Arcadia [am} I. The meaning(s) of this work is a favorite puzzle of scholars. PANOFSKY wrote a famous essay about it in 1936, "Et in Arcadia ego: On the Conception of Transience in Poussin and Watteau." To the regularity, clarity, and measure of Classical style, Poussin added the geometrical , rational mathematics of Descartes, his contemporary, famous for his own maxim, Cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am." That motto, emblematic of the age of ENLIGHTENMENT in which they lived, also fits the organized, contemplative images of Poussin, whose ideas influenced the doctrines promoted by the French Academy (see LINE vs. COLOR). In 1640 Poussin was lured back to Paris to live and work at the Louvre; however, the scale and grandeur of his commissions there were ill suited to him, and after a year and a half, he returned to Rome. Despite his wealth, he chose to live simply: When a man pitied him for having no servants, he in turn consoled the man for having many.