POUSSIN, Nicolas

The theme of bacchants in a landscape frequently occurs in Poussin’s art. In this early version the landscape has only secondary importance, while in the later works it becomes dominant.

This important compositional study, which dates from the mid-1630s, is the only known preparatory drawing for Poussin’s painting called A Dance to the Music of Time, in the Wallace Collection, London. The picture was commissioned by Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi, who later became Pope Clement IX. According to Poussin’s earliest biographer, Bellori, it was Rospigliosi who defined the subject (a ‘moral poem’), which is an allegory about fortune and the cycle of human life, in which the dancers personify poverty, labour, wealth and pleasure. They follow the music of Father Time, who plays a lyre, while putti toy with an hourglass and blow bubbles (both emblems of life’s brevity), and the Janus figure looks to the future and the past. In the sky, Apollo and Aurora emerge from the zodiac to herald the dawn, and the passage of the day and the year.

For Poussin drawing was a practical necessity, rather than a source of delight; this is, however, one of his most appealing studies, in which the sensual figures are defined as slightly abstracted forms, consistently lit from the upper left, as they appear to cavort upon a stage. In the painting the composition becomes more austere and measured. The title now used for it is a creation of the twentieth century, and has become widely known as it was adopted for a famous series of novels by Anthony Powell.

It is assumed by some scholars that this painting is not authentic, it is only a later copy of the lost original, painted in 1648 by Poussin.

This drawing is a copy of an antique bas-relief.

Galatea is a Nereid, or sea-nymph, of Sicilian origin. Ovid (Met. 13:750-897) tells how she loved a handsome youth Acis and was herself loved by Polyphemus, a monstrous one-eyed giant, one of the race of Cyclops. The giant set on a promontory overlooking the sea and played a love song to Galatea on his pipes. Afterwards, wandering disconsolately among the rocks, he discovered her lying in the arms of Acis. The couple fled and Polyphemus in a rage flung a great boulder which killed Acis.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 9 minutes):

George Frideric Handel: Acis and Galathea, Sinfonia and chorus

This is a famous and much copied painting of Poussin. It is signed and dated on the tumbled down column lower right: Accad: rom. NICOLAVS PVSIN faciebat Romae. 1633.

For a long time there was speculation as to whether Poussin’s Annunciation possibly arose in connection with his involvement - documented in contemporary letters - on the design of Cassiano dal Pozzo’s tomb. In view of the simple and at the same time austere monumentality of the picture, identified as a work by Poussin by an illusionistically painted wood panel, it seems suitable as an altarpiece for a burial chapel. But dal Pozzo was not given such a chapel, and hence it now seems more likely that the painting represents a commission issued by Flavio Chigi, who in 1655 was made a Cardinal by Pope Alexander VII - also prominently named on the painted wooden panel.

Two pictures that are very much more Venetian in their inspiration are the Munich Apollo and Daphne and the Louvre Triumph of Flora, whose subjects are taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Throughout his career Poussin liked to dwell on themes of transformation, especially those found in stories from classical antiquity. Apollo pursues Daphne, and to escape his clutches she is transformed into a laurel tree. The theme has a poetic melancholy, and this melancholy is also present to a certain extent in the much more cheerful Flora.

The mythological story of Apollo and Daphne is the following.

The nymph Daphne, the daughter of the river god Peneus, was the first and most celebrated of Apollo’s loves, and was popular with artists in all ages. According to Ovid, Cupid, in a spiteful mood, was the cause. He struck Apollo with a golden arrow, the sort that kindles love, Daphne with a leaden one that puts love to flight. The god pursued the unwilling girl, and, when she had no more strength to flee, she prayed to her father to save her. Whereupon branches sprouted from her arms, roots grew from her feet, and she was changed into a laurel tree.

The theme symbolizes the victory of Chastity over Love.

Poussin returned in his last years to the painting of mythological stories, but in a spirit entirely different from that in which he had treated them in his early years. The Apollo and Daphne, left unfinished at his death, sums up all the strange features of Poussin’s last phase: the wildness and grandeur of inanimate nature, the impassive calm of the human actors, here more than ever like wax images, and the other-wordly atmosphere in which they live. These are no longer the gods and goddesses of Ovid, subject to the passions of the flesh. They are symbols created by the mind of the artist, existing in a world of pure intellect.

Nicolas Poussin was undoubtedly the most important French artist of the seventeenth century, and the major exponent of Baroque classicism. Although he worked in Rome most of his life, his influence not only in Italy but also on French painting was profound. His art was richly informed by prolonged study of the classical past and of the High Renaissance - both of classical sculpture and of Raphael and Titian. He created an extraordinarily controlled, balanced and also various blend from these and other sources, evolving original solutions to traditional problems. The Parnassus is one example.

Poussin paid homage to his revered forerunner Raphael by taking the latter’s Parnassus fresco as the starting-point for a painting of the same subject. The poet being crowned with laurels is sometimes identified as Marino, Poussin’s early patron, who had died earlier in 1625.

Poussin’s oil painting of this subject is now in the Berlin museum.

The authorship and the date of this painting were the subject of much discussion since the Poussin exhibition in Paris in 1960. It is now generally agreed that the painting is autograph painted in the first years of the 1630s. The most obvious pictorial sources of the composition would have been Annibale Carracci’s Assumption of the Virgin (c. 1601); Domenichino’s Glory of St Cecilia in the Polet Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome (1612-15); and his own Assumption on the ceiling of Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome (1617). In each of these examples, the saint is carried aloft by angels and putti, but none is framed by architectural elements.

In Poussin’s painting the Virgin is unusually represented in profile. The absence of the disciples gathered around the Virgin’s tomb is also unusual.

This painting is part of a series of four, entitled the Seasons. The pictures are a sequence, and they are hung in this way in the Grande Galerie of the Louvre.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 11 minutes):

Vivaldi: Concerto in F major RV 293 op. 8 No. 3 (Autumn)

This painting depicts the meeting of Bacchus, the god of wine, with Ariadne on the island of Naxos. The scene shows the strong influence of Titian.

Although he spent most of his career in Rome, Poussin was considered the greatest living French artist, and his work was avidly sought by influential French collectors. This sparkling study can be related to the Triumph of Pan (National Gallery, London) executed for Cardinal Richelieu, the French minister of state, along with a pendant depicting the Triumph of Bacchus (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City). While the finished painting depicts a scene of sensual abandon, the drawn studies reveal Poussin’s cerebral process of composition, in which individual figures are treated as formal elements of a tightly knit composition based on classical ideals of beauty. Here, broad, abstracted areas of wash are used to explore the volume and spatial relations of the complex figural group that can be seen, in reversed direction, at the left side of the painting. At least four other studies for the painting survive - two at Windsor Castle, England, and two at Bayonne, France - suggesting the care with which Poussin prepared this important commission.

In the early 1630s, Poussin was working on a major series of Bacchanals for Cardinal Richelieu which were designed to adorn his château near Orl�ans. The earliest of Poussin’s bacchanals (not one intended for Richelieu) is the Bacchanal before a Statue of Pan in the National Gallery, London. The colours are conspicuously light, with pink and pale blue predominating.

The painting was inspired by the Bacchanal of Titian in the Villa Aldobrandini in Rome.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 7 minutes):

Camille Saint-Saëns: Samson et Delila, Act III, Scene 2, Bacchanal

There are two Bacchanals by Poussin in the Rome museum that are not actually pendants, as they are of different sizes. They are dated to 1626, on the basis of the interest that Poussin had at this time for the Bacchanals of Titian (the painter’s enthusiasm is recorded by both Sandrart and Bellori). In both compositions Poussin “animates” putti borrowed from antique reliefs and shows them playing with objects also taken from antique friezes.

The execution of these two paintings fits perfectly with Poussin’s interests and production during his first Roman years in Rome. Along with his colleagues Sandrart, Duquesnoy, Pietro da Cortona, Claude Lorrain and others, Poussin studied and drew from the Bacchanals of Titian at the Palazzo Aldobrandini and the Villa Ludovisi. Poussin actually copied certain details directly from Titian’s famous Bacchanal of the Andrians, for example the “putto mingens” at the left of the larger picture. Other motifs echo the style of Poussin’s fellow Frenchman Duquesnoy, with whom the painter shared Roman living quarters in 1626.

There are two Bacchanals by Poussin in the Rome museum that are not actually pendants, as they are of different sizes. They are dated to 1626, on the basis of the interest that Poussin had at this time for the Bacchanals of Titian (the painter’s enthusiasm is recorded by both Sandrart and Bellori). In both compositions Poussin “animates” putti borrowed from antique reliefs and shows them playing with objects also taken from antique friezes.

The execution of these two paintings fits perfectly with Poussin’s interests and production during his first Roman years in Rome. Along with his colleagues Sandrart, Duquesnoy, Pietro da Cortona, Claude Lorrain and others, Poussin studied and drew from the Bacchanals of Titian at the Palazzo Aldobrandini and the Villa Ludovisi. Poussin actually copied certain details directly from Titian’s famous Bacchanal of the Andrians, for example the “putto mingens” at the left of the larger picture. Other motifs echo the style of Poussin’s fellow Frenchman Duquesnoy, with whom the painter shared Roman living quarters in 1626.

In the Bacchanal: the Andrians in the Louvre, the mood is even lighter than in the Munich Apollo and Daphne or the Louvre Triumph of Flora, although the colours retain a Venetian richness. In these pictures, Poussin was trying to express his personal vision of the lushness and extravagance of antiquity, tinged with a certain sadness. In some cases he succeeded, although in a number of others his use of a dark ground has caused excessive darkening and the pictures have sometimes lost their brilliance.

The Andrians were the inhabitants of the Aegean island of Andros, famous for its wine, and therefore a centre of the worship of Bacchus in antiquity. Legend told that the god visited the island annually when a fountain of water turned into wine.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 7 minutes):

Camille Saint-Saëns: Samson et Delila, Act III, Scene 2, Bacchanal

Poussin’s scenes, created in his early years in Rome, require of the viewer an extensive acquaintance with ancient mythology. At Cupid’s command, the goat-legged shepherd-god Pan has knelt and taken Venus, the goddess of love, on his shoulders. A little winged putto is giving a hand, and the group is accompanied by a sturdy faun bearing a basket of fruit on his shoulder. The lively ensemble has been set in an Arcadian landscape.

The painting, which was executed for a silk and brocade manufacturer from Lyons, formed the subject of a lecture at the Academic Royale in Paris in 1668, when the painter Sebastien Bourdon argued that Poussin had here treated the essential aspects of painting — light, composition, proportion, colour and harmony — in an exemplary manner and had fused them into a perfect whole, and concluded that Poussin’s art should be considered the supreme example for all artists.

This painting juxtaposes Israelites who are raising their arms to heaven, in a desperate plea for aid in the face of the approaching Egyptians, with others who are already energetically rescuing the weapons of the drowned Egyptians from the waves.

The painting was commissioned by Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi who probably devised the subject: Poverty, Labour, Wealth and Pleasure dance an eternal round to the music of Time.

Even if the Poussin’s depiction of human life dancing a roundelay to the music of time takes up an age-old idea, the subject may have been suggested to him by Giulio Rospigliosi, who commissioned the painting.

A work of transition, painted immediately prior to Poussin’s departure for Rome: the palette and individual gestures still contain echoes of Mannerism.

Narcissus and Echo: a story of a handsome youth and the nymph who loved him but whose love was not returned. In Ovid’s sad rendering of the myth (Met. 3:339-510) Echo was condemned by the goddess Juno to repeat only the last words that were spoken to her; Narcissus, as a punishment for spurning Echo, was made to fall in love with his own reflection, and pined away gazing at himself in a pool. At his death he was changed into flower that bears his name, and Echo in sorrow wasted away until nothing but her voiced remained.

In this representation Narcissus lies dead beside the water while Echo in the background grieves over him.

Taking up Guercino’s interpretation of the subject, Poussin elaborates upon the scene. Thus Guercino’s plinth becomes a proper stone tomb, while the skull is relegated to the background. References to the Arcadian setting are reinforced by the figure of the shepherdess on the left and the allegorical portrayal of the river god on the right.

‘Et in Arcadia ego’ is a phrase coined by Virgil and used in 17th century Italy expressing, in an elliptical way, the humanistic sentiment: Even in Arcadia I (i.e. Death) am to be found. That is to say, even the escapist, pastoral world of Arcady is no refuge from death. The words feature in paintings from that time inscribed on monumental stonework, especially a tomb, which stands in rural surroundings. The earliest representation of the theme by Guercino (Galleria Corsini, Rome) shows two shepherds coming unexpectedly upon a skull - the typical memento mori - that lies on a piece of fallen masonry bearing the words ‘Et in Arcadia ego’.

In the hands of Poussin who made two versions the sense was gradually modified. Shepherds are seen before a tomb deciphering the inscription with an air of melancholy curiosity. The skull is no longer significant or is omitted. The words now seem to imply an epitaph on the person - perhaps a shepherdess - who lies entombed: ‘I too once lived in Arcady’, an alteration to the meaning that somewhat stretches the grammar of the original Latin.

In this version all sense of surprise has been removed, and instead, the shepherds are arranged in attitudes of contemplation round the tomb in the countryside. The artist has lost all interest in story-telling, and has concentrated on a totally static scene. No pleasure is taken in surface texture, and the whole is hard and cold, with the figures in statuesque poses.

The other, less severe version of the subject by Poussin is at Chatsworth.

In 1647 Poussin returned to a subject that he had already interpreted nine years earlier, The Finding of Moses. Here he created an arrangement of young women organized around the central figure of Thermutis, the Pharaoh’s daughter. He used the larger dimensions of this second version not only to accommodate more - and more precise - archaeological details within the composition, but also as the occasion for a more sophisticated use of colour. In contrast to the even luminosity of the first version, Poussin now exploits all the means at his disposal and introduces effects such as the reflection of the sun glittering in the water, behind the bend in the river on the right.

The unusual format and the distinctive asymmetrical composition of the scene, with Hagar seeming to exit the painting, are characteristic of the last phase of Poussin’s career. Likewise, the uncertain and tremulous brushwork, which gives figures and objects an evanescence, derives to the illness of the aging painter who was no longer able to hold the brush as firmly as he previously had. Far from the serene visions of the artist’s youthful periods, this extraordinary landscape is described as menacing and inhospitable with looming black clouds and wild vegetation. Almost lost among these, and scarcely visible, the tiny figure of Hagar moves. Pregnant by Abraham, driven out of her village by the jealous Sarah, she seems here almost annihilated by the power of the nature which surrounds her. The only note of colour is the luminous angel above, who orders Hagar to turn around and retrace her steps: he alone is illuminated by the sun, the source of life and symbol of Hagar’s own fertility.

In Greek mythology Phaethon was the son of Helios, the sun-god. (To the Greeks the nature and functions of Apollo and Helios were distinct and separate. Apollo’s identification with the sun was a later development, and was particularly associated with his cult in Roman times.) Helios drove his chariot daily across the sky. His golden chariot is a ‘quadriga’ yoked to a team of four horses abreast.

Ovid tells of the palace of Helios and his retinue - Day, Month, Year, the Four Seasons and so on. Here Phaethon presented himself and persuaded an unwilling father to allow him for one day to drive his chariot across the skies. The Hours yoked the team of four horses to the golden car, Dawn threw open her doors, and Phaethon was off. Because he had no skill he was soon in trouble, and the climax came when he met the fearful Scorpion of the zodiac. He dropped the reins, the horses bolted and caused the earth itself to catch fire. In the nick of time Jupiter, father of the goods, put a stop to his escapade with a thunderbolt which wrecked the chariot and sent Phaethon hurtling down in flames into the River Eridanus. He was buried by nymphs. Phaethons’s reckless attempt to drive his father’s chariot made him the symbol of all who aspire to that which lies beyond their capabilities.

On the painting the sun-god, having Apollo’s appearance and attributes, sits on a cloudy throne framed in the zodiacal belt, a lyre beside him; Phaethon kneels in front of him.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 43 minutes):

Vivaldi: Four Seasons, violin concertos op. 8 Nos. 1-4

Dating from his mature period, this canvas reflects in its figural arrangement a thorough study of such High Renaissance artists as Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, while the background reveals Possin’s genius in adapting classical architecture to a religious theme. Concerned with achieving a perfectly harmonized composition, the artist has contained the figures within a triangular format; the heads of the Virgin and the Christ Child being at the apex of this pyramid. Although Poussin, the son of a minor government official in Normandy, spent almost the whole of his adult life in Rome, he was held in the highest esteem in France, and more than any other single figure, influenced the course of the seventeenth-century French painting.

This painting is an extremely fine seventeenth-century copy of the original painting by Poussin in the Cleveland Museum of Art. The copyist was a contemporary artist who, although exhibiting different artistic sensibilities, nevertheless demonstrates a certain familiarity with Poussin’s working methods.

This small painting dates from about 1627, several years after Poussin’s arrival in Rome in 1624. During the 1620s Poussin was particularly drawn to Venetian painting and the influence of Titian is dominant here. The dramatic alternations of light and shade as well as the hills and sky at the right reflect an awareness of Titian’s Bacchanal of the Andrians, and the playful swarms of putti must have been inspired by the remarkable Worship of Venus (both works are now in the Museo del Prado, Madrid).

Poussin produced several related compositions.

This painting is based on a passage from the Old Testament and was executed around 1625-1626. In the painting he integrates quotations from antiquity, the frescoes of Raphael and Giulio Romano. The mounted figure of Joshua, for example, goes back to Giulio Romano’s Battle of Constantine in the Vatican.

The painting demonstrates in a convincing manner Poussin’s ability to structure a composition that is both theatrically and aesthetically satisfying.

This painting is one of the most effective of the early works by Poussin. The treatment of the subject is both passionate and austere and anticipates the painting of the same subject now in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin painted almost thirty years later.

Poussin in old age was the grand old man of French painters in Rome. Esteemed by all and collected by discerning connoisseurs, he was revered as the man who had elevated painting to a much more serious plane than many of his Italian contemporaries, whose stature was often that of a decorator. In the early 1660s, however, a great change, which has to be described as a totally new phase, came over Poussin’s art. Only a few pictures from this period survive, the earliest of which is probably the Landscape with Diana and Orion.

The change is in the completely different handling of paint, which shows his preoccupation with surface texture, and a relaxation of mood. His sense of severity and order has disappeared and been replaced by a mood much more akin to the last works of Titian, such as the Diana and Actaeon in the National Gallery, London. In the New York picture the forms are less rigid than previously, and there is a return to the sense of rhythm last seen in his work of the 1630s. The landscape becomes a much more sensual interpretation of such types of painting as the Diogenes.

In Greek mythology Orion was a hunter of gigantic stature. Drunk with wine he once tried to rape a princess of Chios, but her father punished Orion by blinding him. An oracle told him to travel east to the furthest edge of the world where the rays of the rising sun would heal his sight. On his journey he passed the forge of Vulcan whence he carried off an apprentice named Cedalion to guide him on his way. In due course Orion’s sight was restored.

Poussin shows the giant, bow in hand, striding through a wooded countryside towards a distant sea. Cedalion perches on his shoulders. Vulcan stands at the roadside pointing out the way. A cloud, wafting round Orion’s face, suggests that his sight is veiled. Another myth tells how Orion eventually died at the hand of Diana who set his image among the stars. She is seen floating above him.

Poussin in old age was the grand old man of French painters in Rome. Esteemed by all and collected by discerning connoisseurs, he was revered as the man who had elevated painting to a much more serious plane than many of his Italian contemporaries, whose stature was often that of a decorator. In the early 1660s, however, a great change, which has to be described as a totally new phase, came over Poussin’s art. Only a few pictures from this period survive, the earliest of which is probably the Landscape with Diana and Orion.

The change is in the completely different handling of paint, which shows his preoccupation with surface texture, and a relaxation of mood. His sense of severity and order has disappeared and been replaced by a mood much more akin to the last works of Titian, such as the Diana and Actaeon in the National Gallery, London. In the New York picture the forms are less rigid than previously, and there is a return to the sense of rhythm last seen in his work of the 1630s. The landscape becomes a much more sensual interpretation of such types of painting as the Diogenes.

In Greek mythology Orion was a hunter of gigantic stature. Drunk with wine he once tried to rape a princess of Chios, but her father punished Orion by blinding him. An oracle told him to travel east to the furthest edge of the world where the rays of the rising sun would heal his sight. On his journey he passed the forge of Vulcan whence he carried off an apprentice named Cedalion to guide him on his way. In due course Orion’s sight was restored.

Poussin shows the giant, bow in hand, striding through a wooded countryside towards a distant sea. Cedalion perches on his shoulders. Vulcan stands at the roadside pointing out the way. A cloud, wafting round Orion’s face, suggests that his sight is veiled. Another myth tells how Orion eventually died at the hand of Diana who set his image among the stars. She is seen floating above him.

Whereas the mood of the London Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake is intentionally severe, the Landscape with Diogenes in the Louvre is much lighter in tone and mood. In it the well-known story of Diogenes, the humble philosopher, is depicted. Rejecting all worldly goods, he even throws away his last remaining possession, his drinking cup, when he sees a man drinking water from a stream by cupping his hands. The philosopher’s final return to and communion with nature are expressed perfectly in the naturalistic landscape, and although there is a good deal of calculation in the placing of the tree silhouettes, it is the delicacy of each element and the subtle tonality of yellows and greens which dominate. Of all Poussin’s work, this type of picture was imitated the least.

Less severe than the Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe is the Landscape with Orpheus and Euridice in the Louvre. Here the artist was dealing with a much less solemn subject, but even so the forms are rather hard. The whole has the feeling of having been put together in pieces like a jig-saw puzzle, rather than composed as a single entity as was the Diogenes, surely one of the most perfectly ordered but naturalistic landscapes ever painted.

Orpheus is a legendary Thracian poet, famous for his skill with the lyre. He married Eurydice, a wood nymph, and at her death descended into the underworld in an unsuccessful attempt to bring her back to earth.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 7 minutes):

Cristoph Willibald Gluck: Orfeo, Act I, Orpheus’ aria in G Major

The painting provides impressive evidence for Poussin’s view that a familiar subject in painting only becomes new and unique if the artist treats it in an original manner. Thus the composition continues to deploy elements traditionally found in Orpheus representations, but combines and reinterprets them in a surprising fashion.

This picture marks the beginning of Poussin’s final period, that in which poetry rises to an all-embracing feeling for the world - still, however, interpreted through a mythological guise.

The subject was borrowed from “Metamorphoses” by Ovid. A terrible one-eyed giant Polyphemus anamoured of nymph Galathea is singing of his love on a pipe.

This painting belongs to a series painted for the Buen Retiro Palace of King Philip IV. The hermit saint praying in the centre was traditionally identified as St Jerome. Recently, however, it has been shown that the saint is not St Jerome but St Paul the Hermit, whose presence is documented in the palace inventory of 1701.

In the Campanian landscape Matthew the Evangelist is sitting on a stone amongst the ruins of ancient buildings, harkening to an angel who stands before him. A painting of St John on Patmos, of similar design and equal size, in the Art Institute of Chicago was originally a companion-piece to the one in Berlin; they probably formed part of an unfinished series of landscapes with the four Evangelists. The two paintings appear to have parted company at an early stage. Unforeseen circumstances seem to have prevented the completion of the series. Cardinal Francesco Barberini, who presumably commissioned Poussin to paint the pictures (this work is mentioned in an inventory of the Palazzo Barberini of 1692), was forced to flee Rome in 1645, following the death of his uncle, Pope Urban VIII; this would have been reason enough for the painter to leave the series unfinished, in which case the St Matthew landscape must have been the only one the Cardinal actually received, and the second picture sold to another buyer. This would suggest that both pictures were painted before or around 1645, this date being borne out by the development of Poussin’s style, for he had just returned to Italy after a luckless interlude as Court painter in Paris.

In the Berlin painting Poussin has introduced realistic impressions of nature, deriving ostensibly from the Tiber valley at Aqua Acetosa not far from Rome. But there is no question of an exact reproduction of the topographical features, such as the North European artists in Italy so often tried to achieve. As in all Poussin’s works, the composition here is essentially imaginative: the double bend of the river conveys the full depth of the valley, while the soaring tower of a distant ruin is the dominant vertical feature of the landscape, lending emphasis to the quiet dialogue between Evangelist and angel; his own features shaded, Matthew looks up at the divine messenger who stands bathed in a bright light. The remains of the building material, stones cut in cubic and cylindrical forms, not only provide depth and perspective but also lend a note of gravity to this heroic landscape, and are so placed as to achieve the maximum artistic effect.

At the end of the eighteenth century this painting formed part of a legacy to the Colonna di Sciarra family, and its presence in their palazzo was confirmed in 1820. In 1873 it was acquired for the Berlin Gallery.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 8 minutes):

Johann Sebastian Bach: St. Matthew Passion BWV 244 (excerpts)

Poussin was the innovator of Classical landscape, although only about a dozen of his pictures of this type survive. Their stylistic source was the Aldobrandini Lunettes by Annibale Carracci, assisted by Domenichino and Lanfranco. Poussin abandoned many of the Italians’ concessions to realism and retreated into a totally artificial world devoid of subtle light or atmosphere. The earliest of the truly Classical landscapes is probably the Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake.

In this picture a drama is taking place, but it is not immediately apparent. it was Poussin’s aim to bring about this realization slowly in the spectator, through contemplation. A man lies dead in the foreground in the coils of a snake, and another man has come across the spectacle and is fleeing in terror. In the background a woman reacts to the terror of the man in flight, and in turn her reaction is noticed by a fisherman.. Poussin has depicted a series of emotions in this extensive panorama which is painted in dense blues, greens and browns. The gloom of the scene is intended to provoke the spectator to contemplate the triumph of nature over man.

The painting probably was painted for one of Poussin’s main patrons, Pointel.

From 1648 come the two Phocion landscapes, the Funeral of Phocion (Earl of Plymouth loan to the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff) and the Gathering of the Ashes of Phocion, now in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Painted as a pair, both pictures are constructed exactly like a stage set. Perhaps it was because this way of creating a landscape was very theoretical that such compositions were imitated so widely; they were seen as the proper way to paint landscape - by construction rather than by observation. The scenes are of great tragedy: in one the good General Phocion has been wrongly accused by the citizens of Athens and sentenced to death, and in the other his grieving widow collects his ashes. The deep melancholy of these two pictures again indicates Poussin’s determination to make the mind exercise thought rather than imagination.

From 1648 come the two Phocion landscapes, the Funeral of Phocion (Earl of Plymouth loan to the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff) and the Gathering of the Ashes of Phocion, now in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Painted as a pair, both pictures are constructed exactly like a stage set. Perhaps it was because this way of creating a landscape was very theoretical that such compositions were imitated so widely; they were seen as the proper way to paint landscape - by construction rather than by observation. The scenes are of great tragedy: in one the good General Phocion has been wrongly accused by the citizens of Athens and sentenced to death, and in the other his grieving widow collects his ashes. The deep melancholy of these two pictures again indicates Poussin’s determination to make the mind exercise thought rather than imagination.

Poussin painted two versions of The Massacre of the Innocents between 1628 and 1632. In the first version, the gruesome scene, in which the mothers are desperately trying to protect their children from the murderous soldiers, unfolds across the pictorial plane like a frieze, with the figures arranged one beside the other. Although Poussin attempts to establish a connection between the three groups, insofar as he presents them as isolated moments within an unfolding sequence of movement, the pairs of figures lack a certain cohesion.

Having already suffered greatly in the 1700s, at the beginning of the 20th century the canvas was the target of a politically motivated attack. Its damaged areas could only be partially restored and some clumsy additions were made. It is consequently difficult to date the work, and its attribution was for a long time disputed. In 1994, however, a reference to the painting was discovered in the inventory of a Roman collection of the 17th century, where it is described as a work by Poussin.

Poussin painted two versions of The Massacre of the Innocents between 1628 and 1632. For the second version, he made a preparatory study in a drawing that he evidently only translated into a painting some time later.

In the second version, he extracts a single motif - the man trampling on the child and grasping the mother by her hair - from the first version and composes a new scene around this group. Its essential elements are already present in the drawing: from a number of figures lined up in a row, Poussin reduces the protagonists to the ensemble of mother, infant and soldier and supplements this with a mother fleeing in the right-hand background. The figures are made to stand out in monumental fashion against the blue sky.

In 1927 the British painter Francis Bacon, who at that time was living near Chantilly, saw in the local Mus�e Cond� the Massacre of the Innocents II, from which he would draw inspiration throughout his career.

The subject is taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (XI: 100–145). In gratitude to Midas, King of Phrygia, for saving the life of Silenus, his foster-son, Bacchus offered to grant the king whatever he wished for. Midas unwisely wished that “all that my body touches turn to gold,” but was soon dying of thirst and hunger as a result. When he returned to Bacchus to ask him “to undo the favour that he had done for him,” Bacchus told him to wash in the source of the Pactolus, which from that day carried grains of gold in its waters. Midas can be seen washing himself at the centre left, while the figure of a large, reclining river god, a personification of the Pactolus, dominates the foreground.

In Greek legend Midas was a king of Phrygia who was granted a wish by Bacchus in return for a good deed he had done to Silenus, a follower of the god. Midas wished that everything he touched be turned to gold, but soon realized his mistake when all food became inedible. Bacchus ordered him to wash in the River Pactolus in Lydia. Hence the popular aetiology of the gold-bearing properties of the river, thought to have been the source of wealth of the kings of Lydia, of whom Croesus was the last.

Midas is depicted penitently before Bacchus, a drunken Silenus sleeping nearby. Another version of the subject by Poussin (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) depicts Midas washing in the river, while the river god reclines on his urn.

Although the painting initially was attributed to Poussin, it seems now that it is by an anonymous artist inspired by a sketch of Poussin (now in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm) for a painting he never executed.

There are two autograph paintings of this subject by Poussin, one in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, and another in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin. These paintings show different ways of feeding the infant Jupiter, corresponding to the various classical authors. The painting in Washington, despite several beautifully executed passages, especially in the foliage and the landscape, betrays numerous weaknesses incompatible with authentic paintings by Poussin.

Pan (Lat. Faunus) is the Greek god of woods and fields, flocks and herds. In Renaissance allegory he personifies Lust; he charmed the nymphs with the music of his pipes, and was said to have lain with all the Maenads. His home was Arcadia, which stood not merely for the region of the Pelloponese where he was originally worshipped, but also for the romantic paradise of the pastoral poets and artists like Poussin. This realm is inhabited by nymphs and shepherds, by satyrs, maenads, Silenus, Priapus and the centaurs who, with Pan, formed the retinue of Bacchus. It was from the latter that Pan acquired his goat’s legs.

The story of Pan and Syrinx is told by Ovid (Met. 1:689-713). Pan was pursuing a nymph of Arcadia named Syrinx when they reached the river Ladon which blocked her escape. To avoid the god’s clutches she prayed to be transformed, and Pan unexpectedly found himself holding an armful of tall reeds. The sound of the wind blowing through them so pleased him that he cut some and made a set of pipes which are named after the nymph.

Poussin chooses the moment in which Pan has almost caught the fleeing nymph: but movement becomes pose, time stands still, and Syrinx escapes through her transformation. Despite the terpsichorean harmony of the two, their contrary desires are convincingly written into their figures: the joyous yearning and onwards urge of Pan, and Syrinx’s timid wish to preserve herself. The sensual vitality of the shepherd-god and the chaste beauty of the nymph are also clearly characterised by the artist’s choice of colours: Pan, a reddish brown, and Syrinx pale in colour.

Flying above the pair is Cupid as a winged boy holding a torch and a lead-tipped arrow, which he is about to cast at Syrinx. Ovid tells us that Cupid had various arrow-tips: a golden tip awakened love, while that of lead had the opposite effect.

The dramatic events of the pursuit and the transformation take place within a landscape suffused with light; a light which, with its delicate, atmospheric sfumato, would have been more fitting for an idyll than this dramatic scene. The putti at the bottom of the picture cast themselves aside in fright. The tree trunk on the far right has been painted over Pan’s hoof. Evidently Poussin added the tree at a later stage, to produce greater articulation in the picture’s spatial structure.

The river-god Ladon checks the two central protagonists, allowing the picture’s suspense and dynamism to culminate at its centre. His face, reminiscent of that of the Antique sculpture of Laocoon in his death throes, seems to bear the ineluctable suffering of Antique tragedies, with a depth and emotion that goes beyond all human contingency. From the moment of its discovery in 1506 in Rome, the Hellenistic sculpture of the Trojan priest and his sons entwined by serpents awoke the especial interest of artists, for it showed a restrained formulation of agonising death that was valid for all time.

This early drawing still displays typical characteristics of the School of Fontainebleau, such as the highly popular combination of large and small figures, their size difference explained by their appearance at varying spatial depths. Poussin finds additional justification for exploiting this device in the fact that the figure lurking in the foreground is a giant.

Some of Poussin’s pictures painted in the latter half of the 1640s can be dated. They include Rebecca at the Well, painted for Pointel in 1648, where the large scale and almost frozen quality of the figures is the same as that of the Edinburgh Sacraments. In such pictures Poussin seems to have lost the art of charging each figure with a living emotion, as he had done in the first set of Sacraments, and there is an increased gravity at the expense of humanity; but some people see this as the summit of Poussin’s achievement just because it is such an extreme.

The biblical story depicted in the painting is the following.

The patriarch Abraham, wishing to find a wife for her son Isaac, sent his servant Eliezer, to look for a suitable bride amaong his own kindred in Mesopotamia, rather than among the people of Canaan where he dwelt. When the servant reached the city of Nahor in Chaldea he prayed for guidance, asking that whoever gave him and his camels water at the well would be an eligible woman. This proved to be Rebecca, a virgin, one of the family of Abraham throrugh his brother Nahor. She invited Eliezer to drink from her jar, and drew water for his camels. Eliezer gave his presents of gold and received hospitality at her parents’ house. He then took her back to Canaan.

Poussin here illustrates an episode from the childhood of the Greek king Pyrrhus, a scene not previously treated in painting. As in the case of the second Massacre of the Innocents, he uses the opportunity to demonstrate the possibilities of painting: although mute, it is able to convey things that can in fact only be heard, such as voices and noises, and to communicate with the viewer without the use of the spoken word.

The theme is taken from Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (“Jerusalem Delivered”). Armida is the enchantress who holds Rinaldo under her spell in a magical palace that is an illusion. Without him, affairs are going badly for the crusaders. The pastoral idyll, Armida’s hate for the crusaders turned to love for one Crusader, and the call of duty that leaves Armida abandoned, all appealed to Baroque and Rococo artists. George Frideric Handel composed an opera using a libretto written by Giacomo Rossi, based on episodes of Gerusalemme liberata.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 8 minutes):

George Frideric Handel: Two arias, Rinaldo, Acts II and III

Selene in Greek mythology was the goddess of moon (Lat. Luna), whom the Romans identified with Diana (Gk. Artemis). The Romans worshipped her as a triple deity, Luna (the sky), Diana (the earth), Hecate (the underworld). According to myth she was the daughter of Jupiter and Latona (Leto), and the twin sister of Apollo.

Endymion, the beautiful youth who fell into an eternal sleep, has captured the imagination of poets and artists as a symbol of timelessness of beauty that is a ‘joy forever.’ Endymion, sent to sleep for ever by the command of Jupiter, in return for being granted perpetual youth, was visited nightly by the goddess. Poussin’s painting shows Endymion awake, kneeling to welcome the arrival of the moon goddess, while her brother the sun-god is just beginning his journey across the heavens in his golden chariot.

This is an earlier version of the self-portrait, executed in 1650, now in the Louvre. Poussin had done the earlier version to replace a disappointing portrait of himself which his Parisian patrons commissioned from a Roman artist.

The most conspicuous motif of the earlier self-portrait is the “memento mori”. The artist present himself before a sepulchral monument - anticipating his own - flanked by putti; the expression on his face is almost cheerful. Viewed from a distance he appears to be smiling, while his head, inclined slightly to one side, suggest a melancholic mood. Cheerfulness in the face of death demonstrated the composure of the Stoics, a philosophy for which Poussin had some sympathy.

In the self-portrait at the Louvre the artist, wearing a dark green gown and with a stole thrown over his shoulders, is shown in a slightly different pose than in the earlier version in Berlin: posture is erect, his head turned to present an almost full-face view. His facial expression is more solemn, but also less decided. Instead of funeral symbolism, the setting is the artist’s studio, lent strangely abstract quality by a staggered arrangement of three framed canvases, one behind the other, whose quadratic structure is echoed by the dark doorframe behind them. It is apparent that the canvas nearest to us is empty, except for a painted inscription. At the left on the second canvas there is a woman in front of a landscape, wearing a diadem with an eye; a man’s hands are reaching out to hold her shoulders. This has been interpreted as an allegory: painting crowned as the greatest of arts.

A tiny but highly significant detail is the ring Poussin is wearing on the little finger of his right hand, which rests on a fastened portfolio. The stone is cut in a four-sided pyramid. As an emblematic motif, this symbolized the Stoic notion of Constantia, or stability and strength of character.

The painting is signed and dated: EFFIGIES NICOLAI POUSSINI ANDELYENSIS PICTORIS, ANNO AETATIS 56. ROMAE ANNO JUBILEI 1650.

St Cecilia is a Christian saint and virgin martyr believed to have lived in the 2nd or 3rd century. She is the patron saint of music, her attribute being the organ (often the portative type).

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 3 minutes):

Girolamo Frescobaldi: Ricercar No. 8

Poussin here arranges the figures into a frieze-like composition, as if on an antique relief. The groups seen in profile on the left and right lend particular emphasis to the figures standing in the centre and viewed from the front. For the pose of the man kneeling in front of St John the Baptist, the painter looks back to a sarcophagus relief.

This subject is rather rare in painting.

The two Phocion landscapes are extreme, but Poussin was to take his ideas even further, in such almost black pictures as the Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut at Frankfurt. In this picture the thoughts of the artist are so prominent that the spectator is denied any form of visual pleasure, and it requires a great deal of mental effort to contemplate it.

This painting is one of the few large-scale works of the master. It depicts the story of Pyramus and Thisbe as Ovid tells in Metamorphoses (4:55-166). The lovers , forbidden by their parents to marry, planned to meet in secret one night beside a spring. Thisbe arrived first but as she waited a lioness, fresh from a kill, came to quench its thirst, its jaws dripping blood. Thisbe fled, in her haste dropping her cloak which the beast proceeded to tear to shreds. When Pyramus arrived and discovered the bloody garment he believed the worst. Blaming himself for his lover’s supposed death he plunged his sword into his side. Thisbe returned to find her lover dying and so, taking his sword, threw herself upon it. This story became widely popular in post-Renaissance painting.

This is the latest of Poussin’s three great cityscapes of the mid-1650s, each of which portrays a narrative from the New Testament against a background of massive classical architecture. The two other paintings, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery of 1653, and The Death of Sapphira of about 1654, are in the Louvre, Paris. All three are strongly influenced by the art of Raphael, in particular his tapestry cartoons of the Acts of the Apostles made for the Sistine Chapel, seven of which survive in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The subject of Saints Peter and John Healing the Lame Man, the first miracle performed by the Apostles after the death of Christ, is taken from Acts 3:1–10. At the gate of the Temple of Jerusalem a lame man begging for alms is miraculously cured by Peter, who asks him to rise up and walk, and John, who touches his arm and points to heaven - the true source of the miracle. The stairs, at the top of which this encounter is staged, are animated with carefully balanced figure groups, not unlike Raphael’s 1508 fresco of the School of Athens (Vatican Museums). Some of the witnesses express amazement, while others simply go about their business. The young man on the second step gazing toward the right has been borrowed from Raphael’s fresco. The facial type of the lame man and, to a great extent, his pose are closely modeled on the figure in Raphael’s cartoon of this subject, and the hands of St Peter and the lame man recall those of Adam and God the Father in Michelangelo’s famous Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel.

Poussin painted two versions of The Massacre of the Innocents between 1628 and 1632. For the second version, he made a preparatory study in a drawing that he evidently only translated into a painting some time later.

Work of the Bologna-based Carracci family was widely emulated in France. Reproductions and imitations began swelling collections. Simon Vouet, S�bastien Bourdon, Nicolas Poussin, and Clude Lorrain were all steeped in the “Bolognese” culture.

The Seasons, the four canvasses of Poussin’s late period now in the Louvre, are an even more extreme personal statement than the Landscape with Diana and Orion. They are the supreme expression, not in this case of mind over eye, but of praise for the beauty and grandeur of nature, now ordered by man, and now defeating man. Spring is luxuriant, Summer a fecund harvest, Autumn the gathering of mellow grapes and Winter the terrible deluge in which all mankind is overwhelmed and destroyed.

The biblical story depicted in Summer is the following.

Ruth was a Moabite woman and great-grandmother of David, and therefore an ancestress of Christ, hence her place in Christian art. She was married to a Hebrew immigrant in Moab and after his death left her native land and went with her mother-in-law Naomi, to Bethlehem. Here she was allowed to glean the corn in the fields belonging to Boaz, a rich farmer and kinsman of Naomi. Ruth, true to her nature, maintained, on Naomi’s advice, a modest demeanour among the young men working at the harvest. One night she went and lay at the feet of Boaz as he slept in the field. By this act Boaz saw her virtue and later decided to assume responsibilities towards her of a kinsman. In due course he married her.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 10 minutes):

Vivaldi: Concerto in G minor RV 315 op. 8. No. 2 (Summer)

Poussin showed a preference to dealing with subjects such as the sentimental and melancholic scenes from Tasso’s “Gerusalemme Liberata”, for example the strange encounter Tancred and Erminia in dusky twilight. The scene is played out between two attentive horses - one bay the other white.

In Tancred and Erminia, the daughter of the Saracen king, Erminia, hastens to the aid of the knight Tancred when she finds him wounded after defeating a giant in single combat. Although strictly speaking one of his enemies, she kneels determinedly beside him and cuts off her beautiful tresses in order to stanch his bleeding.

Poussin here juxtaposes arms and love, in order to demonstrate the power of love even over an enemy: on the right lie the gleaming pieces of magnificent armour that have been removed from Tancred, who has suffered a serious wound in battle. At the same time, Erminia raises his sword to cut off her hair, so as to bind up his wounds with her tresses.

The theme is taken from Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (“Jerusalem Delivered”), which describes a battle between the Christians and the Muslims during the siege of Jerusalem at the end of the First Crusade. Poussin selects an episode in which the Christian knight Rinaldo has landed on the island of the seductive enchantress Armida; having bewitched him with her singing, Armida is on the point of stabbing the sleeping crusader with a dagger when love stays her hand, and she decides instead to carry him off to her enchanted palace.

Poussin portrays the moment in which the still sleeping Rinaldo, defenceless, stripped of his weapons and bound with garlands of flowers, is abducted by Armida with the aid of a band of putti, while the companions who had first persuaded the knight to land on the island wait beside a column in the background.

George Frideric Handel composed an opera using a libretto written by Giacomo Rossi, based on episodes of Gerusalemme liberata.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 8 minutes):

George Frideric Handel: Two arias, Rinaldo, Acts II and III

How Nicolas Poussin the son of a Norman farmer became Nicolas Poussin ‘painter-philosopher’ in Rome, with ‘a mind…as it were naturalised in antiquity’, is one of the great triumphs of pertinacity over circumstance. Few artists of his importance have had such inadequate training, or found their true vocation so late. His interest in art was aroused by a minor itinerant painter working in a local church in Les Andelys. In the same year, ¹⁶¹¹⁄₁₂, Poussin left home for Paris. After years of hardship, and two unsuccessful attempts to reach Rome, he attracted favourable attention in 1622 with six paintings for the Jesuits. In 1624 he finally settled in Rome, firmly intent on emulating Raphael and ancient sculpture.

Poussin’s early period in Italy was barely easier than his years in Paris. As well as Raphael, engravings, statuary and a famous ancient wall-painting then in a princely collection, he studied Domenichino and Guido Reni and discovered Titian, whose Bacchus and Ariadne among other mythological scenes had just been brought to Rome from Ferrara. Not until he was about 35 did Poussin find his own voice, and patrons to heed it. From about 1630, with the exception of an unhappy interlude in Paris working for the king in 1640-2, he mainly painted smallish canvases for private collectors. Out of his very limitations, he created a new kind of art: the domestic ‘history painting’ with full-length but small-scale figures, for the edification and delight of the few. Seldom has a painter been more intense, more serious and, in the event, more influential.

The Adoration of the Golden Calf was originally paired with the Crossing of the Red Sea now in Melbourne. Both illustrate episodes from Exodus in the Old Testament; this painting relates to chapter 32. In the wilderness of Sinai the children of Israel, disheartened by Moses’ long absence, asked Aaron to make them gods to lead them. Having collected all their gold earrings, Aaron melted them down into the shape of a calf, which they worshipped. In the background on the left Moses and Joshua come down from Mount Sinai with the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Hearing singing and seeing ‘the calf and the dancing…Moses’ anger waxed hot, and he cast the tablets out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.’ The tall bearded figure in white is Aaron still ‘making proclamation’ of a feast to the false god.

Poussin is said to have made little figures of clay to use as models, and the story is confirmed by the dancers in the foreground. They are a mirror image of a pagan group of nymphs and satyrs carousing in Poussin’s earlier Bacchanalian Revel also in the National Gallery. Within a majestic landscape painted in the bold colours Poussin learned from Titian, before a huge golden idol more bull than calf (and many earrings’ worth), these Israelite revellers give homage to the potency of Poussin’s vision of antiquity. As on a sculpted relief or painted Greek vase, figures are shown in suspended animation, heightened gestures or movements isolated from those of their neighbours, so that the effect of the whole is at one and the same time violent and static.

This is perhaps the most popular painting of the artist. There are many copies, enlarged or adapted versions from the 19th centuries in various churches in France.

The subject of the painting is taken from the Old Testament, Amalek is a figure in the Hebrew Bible. The Amalekites were a people mentioned a number of times in the book of Genesis, and considered to be Amalek’s descendents. The Biblical relationship between the Hebrew and Amalekite tribes was that the Amalekite tribes without provocation pounced on the Hebrews when they were weak. The Amalekites became associated with ruthlessness and trickery and tyranny. David waged a sacred war of extermination against the Amalekites, who may have subsequently disappeared from history.

Poussin’s paintings display a highly idiosyncratic French rationalism. Already in this early work, one of the first painted after his arrival in Italy, he places two radically distinct subjects - the “thick of battle” and Moses praying (which ultimately decides the outcome) - into a tight picture space, distorting proportions but, in exchange, achieving unity and extreme intensity of action.

This picture illustrates an episode from Torquato Tasso’s heroic poem Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered). First published in 1580, the poem combines an account of the First Crusade with imaginary adventures and love stories. One of the heroes, Rinaldo, is abducted by the pagan sorceress Armida, who falls in love with him and carries him off to her palace on the island of Fortune. There she casts a spell on him causing him to fall in love with her. Two Christian knights, Carlo and Ubaldo, come to exhort Rinaldo to leave his beloved and rejoin his fellow crusaders, but their way to Armida’s palace is blocked by a dragon. It is this scene, recorded in canto 15 of Tasso’s poem that is represented here.

One of four paintings by Poussin that illustrate the story of Rinaldo and Armida, this is the latest in the story’s sequence and is usually dated in the early 1630s. A work from the same period, now in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, shows Armida about to slay the sleeping Rinaldo, but suddenly arrested by his beauty. In a painting in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, slightly later than the Dulwich picture, Armida has dropped her dagger and is about to lift Rinaldo up and carry him off with her to her island. A third picture, in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, represents the actual carrying off of Rinaldo by Armida and was painted by Poussin in 1637 for his friend and fellow artist, Jacques Stella. These works cannot have formed a unified cycle as they differ in style and dimensions.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 8 minutes):

George Frideric Handel: Two arias, Rinaldo, Acts II and III

The Death of Camilla, depicting an episode from Virgin’s Aeneid, contains motifs to which Poussin would be able to return for the composition of his first Roman painting: warriors striding into the battle from the side with their weapons drawn, soldiers falling backwards onto the ground or already felled, troops hurling spears - all of these appear both in the drawing and in the painting Joshua’s Victory over the Amorites.

In his Metamorphoses, Ovid relates how Diana shot an arrow through the sneering Chione’s slanderous tongue. Poussin’s drawing is impressive both for the directness with which it illustrates the outcome of this brutal act and the confidence with which it conveys the grief and despair of Chione’s bereaved family at the same time as the triumph of Diana.

The first important commission Poussin received was from Cardinal Francesco Barberini at the end of 1626, for the Death of Germanicus. The picture, now in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, was completed early in 1628 and immediately became famous. The subject was inspired by the ‘Annals’ of Tacit. This was the first of the deathbed scenes that Poussin was to favour throughout his life. The figures are arranged in a frieze-like composition which was almost certainly derived from the arrangement of figures on classical sarcophagi. Already, too, there is a preoccupation with classical antiquity and its intensely moral approach to life. In his pictures Poussin was to become obsessed by morality, and with man facing the supreme trial: how to face death with equanimity.

In the last part of the 1630s Poussin’s art underwent a rapid metamorphosis. One of the best examples of this is the Destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem. It is dry in handling and agitated in composition, and has that peculiar unattractiveness of surface on which Poussin was to dwell so much in his later years. His denial of the sensual quality of painting was deliberate: this preoccupation with surface texture is found in all his pictures of around 1630. Yet the Vienna picture succeeds by the mood it creates. The subject is one of prime importance for Jewish as well as Christian history - the final and irrevocable loss of the Jews’ holiest place - and Poussin has concentrated on the mood of wanton destruction.

This is the second version of The Destruction of the Temple by Poussin, the first version has come down to us only in an engraving. Here the individual scenes are framed between the regular succession of huge columns. It is evident that the artist has already begun to study Rome’s ancient monuments, as a comparison with antique sculptures such as the Trophies of Marius reveals.

By 1630, Poussin was moving towards the uncompromising statements about the moral condition of humanity that were to characterize his work. In that year he painted the Plague of Ashdod (Louvre, Paris), which sets the style and mood of his work for the next five years. The following year he painted the Empire of Flora, a more cheerful subject but with a similarly interlocking frieze of figures. It is round these two pictures, datable through documents, that the rest of Poussin’s pictures supposedly painted around 1630 have to be grouped.

This is one of the earliest paintings executed by Poussin in Rome. It was commissioned by the Sicilian nobleman Fabrizio Valguarnera.

By 1630, Poussin was moving towards the uncompromising statements about the moral condition of humanity that were to characterize his work. In that year he painted the Plague of Ashdod (Louvre, Paris), which sets the style and mood of his work for the next five years. The following year he painted the Empire of Flora, a more cheerful subject but with a similarly interlocking frieze of figures. It is round these two pictures, datable through documents, that the rest of Poussin’s pictures supposedly painted around 1630 have to be grouped.

This is one of the earliest paintings executed by Poussin in Rome. It was commissioned by the Sicilian nobleman Fabrizio Valguarnera.

Flora, the goddess of flowers, dances gaily through a garden peopled with characters from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, all of whom transform into flowers at the moment of their death and so live on. In the foreground, Poussin includes the figures of Narcissus and the nymph Echo already familiar from his earlier painting.

This painting was executed in 1654 for Jacques Stella. It depicts the scene when Moses’s mother put him in an ark of bulrushes in the Nile after the Pharaoh had ordered all new-born Hebrew sons to be killed. This subject is less common than the popular depiction of the finding of Moses by the Pharaoh’s daughter.

This painting, the latest and grandest of Poussin’s three versions of the theme, was acquired by the National Gallery jointly with the National Museum of Wales in 1988 and is shown alternately in London and Cardiff.

Poussin illustrated events from the life of Moses at least nineteen times. It has been pointed out that when he could, he avoided painting scenes of saintly visions or martyrdoms, the stock-in-trade of seventeenth-century religious art. He concentrated instead on the central themes of Christianity, relating them both to their historical context in the ancient Near East and to the basic tenets of other religions, following an intellectual fashion of the day. Of the Old Testament subjects which he painted, the majority belong to the category of types, or prefigurations, of Salvation.

From Early Christian times the Old Testament was read by Christians for its analogies with the New. Thus the waters of the Nile to which the infant Moses is consigned by his mother in ‘an ark of bulrushes’, following Pharaoh’s cruel order to drown all the male Israelite babies (Exodus 1:2), were likened to the waters of baptism. But Poussin’s interest in Moses may have been prompted also by his identification with pagan deities; as a contemporary writer influenced by these ideas wrote of this picture: ‘He is Moses, the Mosche of the Hebrews, the Pan of the Arcadians, the Priapus of the Hellespont, the Anubis of the Egyptians.’

All these ideas reverberate throughout the painting. The baby on whom Pharaoh’s daughter has taken pity resembles the Christ Child blessing the Magi or the shepherds in a scene of the Adoration. In the background on the left an Egyptian priest worships the dog-shaped god Anubis (barely visible now that the surface paint has grown thin and transparent). We know we are in Egypt because on the rock above the main scene a river god, symbolising the Nile, embraces a sphinx, palm trees stand on the shore and an obelisk rises up behind a stately temple. (Curiously, the many-windowed buildings with which Poussin, who had never been there, endows Pharaoh’s country now resemble modern resort hotels.)

The main interest and beauty of the painting, however, do not reside in its possible symbolism, but in the wonderful grouping of the figures, all women to contrast with an analogous group of men in Christ healing the Blind Man (now in the Louvre), painted for the same patron the year before. Each plays her role in the dramatic tale, the princess generous and commanding, the maids curious and delighted. The humbler figure in a white shift at Moses’ head may be his sister who watched from nearby to see what would happen to him, and recommended their mother to Pharaoh’s daughter as a wet nurse. It is tempting to see their brilliant draperies as a compliment to Poussin’s patron, the Lyon silk merchant Reynon. Bodies and colours, each distinct and separate, combine in ample rhythms across the picture surface, echoed by the rocks beyond. It is at once solemn and joyful, as befits a scene in which a child is rescued from death, and through him an entire people is saved.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 5 minutes):

Gioacchino Rossini: Moses, Moses’ Prayer

The figure of the Pharaoh’s daughter Thermutis, leaning against her maid as she instructs her companions to attend to the infant Moses rescued from the Nile, is taken from an earlier painting by Poussin, the Theseus Finding His Father’s Sword of c. 1635. In the latter painting Aithra, Theseus’s mother is supported by a female servant.

In the figure compositions of Poussin’s last phase certain features present in the previous years are intensified, such as the almost puritanical simplicity and severity of the compositions, and the elimination of all picturesque ornament. But there are new qualities. In The Holy Family in Egypt, painted in about 1655-57, for instance, the calmness has been carried to a much higher pitch. Action and gesture have disappeared, and even facial expression is reduced to the minimum. The whole painting is typical of the method of expressive understatement which Poussin uses so much in the last period.

A motionless quality is found in the few classical paintings of Poussin’s last years, such as the Holy Families. The most striking of these is one with almost life-size figures in the Hermitage, probably finished in 1655. The last vestiges of action and expression have gone. The only figure to make any gesture at all is the infant St John, who holds out his hands. The other figures are lost in a marble stillness, which gives a sort of abstract grandeur to the composition.

The painting was commissioned by Pierre Fr�art de Chantelou, a court official of Louis XIII, for whose personal collection the artist executed a series of works.

Jupiter was the son of Saturn, the god who devoured his children because it was prophesied that one of them would usurp him. Jupiter’s mother fled to Crete where she gave birth to him in a cave. She gave Saturn a large stone wrapped in swaddling clothes which he unsuspectingly swallowed instead. Jupiter was brought up on the slopes of Cretan Mt Ida by nymphs who fed him on wild honey and on milk from the goat Amalthea.

In the painting of Poussin, a nymph has Jupiter in her arms, holding a jug of milk to his lips, while another gathers honeycombs, and a shepherd milks the goat.

In The Inspiration of the Lyric Poet, completed around 1627, the poet experiences the dawning light of inspiration with the help of a draught from the sacred spring of Castalia, offered to him by Apollo, the divine patron of the arts, accompanied by Euterpe, the Muse of lyric poetry. Putti fly down from above to crown the poet, thus honoured, with flowers, branches and wreaths of laurel.

Poussin spent almost all his career in Rome painting in isolation. He endeavoured to create a clear visual language that would appeal to the spectator’s mind and affect him rationally rather than through the emotions His oeuvre is one of the supreme expressions of classicism in French art. The subject of the Inspiration of the Poet remains under discussion: it is possible that the young man on the right, being inspired by Apollo, is Virgil, and the figure standing on the left Calliope, muse of epic poetry. In both figures there are distinct references to antique sculpture, as so often in Poussin’s work, and the golden light shows the influence of the great Venetian painters of the sixteenth century.

The appearance of the muse Calliope has led to the suggestion that the picture was painted in honour of a recently dead poet.

The detail shows the figure of Calliope.

The detail shows the poet and a putto.

The huge altarpiece was painted for the Sainte-Chapelle in Saint-Germaine-en-Laye.