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Death in Arcadia

To modern eyes, landscape offers a choice. Will it be truth or fiction, Homer’s seacoast or Dali’s melted watch, the picture of a nation or the picture of a mind at play? To look freshly at older art, however, one has to see past the dilemma. That is the challenge of a concise survey of Nicolas Poussin, through May 11, as seen entirely through his landscapes. Without missing a beat, the Metropolitan Museum calls it “Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions.”

Does that make him a naturalist or a visionary? Poussin kept his answers clear, crisp, short, sweet, and ambiguous. He helped give French painting a classical ideal, but he went to modern Rome to discover it for himself. He set Baroque painting in the ancient world, but he brought out the dark side of Arcadia-the ancient ideal of pastoral simplicity. It is the subject of my latest upload, a new, longer review that I am just excerpting here. (Previous reviews on this webzine have looked at drawings from the French Academy, Nicolas Poussin’s “Holy Family on the Steps,” and the life of the greatest Poussin scholar, Anthony Blunt.)

Claude Lorrain, made sunlight itself a Classical ideal. Poussin’s landscapes have increasingly rich, darkening skies, but death lurks everywhere right from the start. Shepherds discover it on a gravestone, inscribed Et in Arcadia Ego-”and I, too, am in Arcadia.” The myths that Poussin so cherished usually end in death, and his paintings combine them freely, to say the least. At least two works show men fleeing a snakebite, with no clear source in Ovid or anywhere else. He likes architecture best when some of it lies in ruins.

Landscapes also demonstrate his powers of observation, from reflections on water to pen studies of natural history. Scenes set in Biblical times include the Castel Sant’Angelo and other buildings in Rome. However, Poussin is not out to naturalize or to deconstruct belief. For Poussin, people and landscape belong together, because every landscape bears human significance. Forests seem devoid of birds or animals, unless they have a role to play in human life.

His paintings of the 1620s almost drown in Roman color. He surrounds his shepherds and satyrs with winding trees and a rush of leaves. The cast has unnaturally ruddy flesh tones, with olive underpainting to bring out shadows. Mythic heroes and heroines, like the satyrs, indulge in the usual hungers for vanity, alcohol, or sex. Everything has as much bulk as possible, but everything is in motion. Landscape is an expression of human action and an active mind.

Poussin sees the ancient world as an imagined world, an active world, and already a fallen world. Back in Rome after just three years, he deepens the landscapes. Finally, in his sixties, with pain in his fingers and painting a struggle, the limitations only increase his economy and add to his technique. These darker works are harder for the eye to navigate-and sometimes hard for even scholars to decipher fully-but more vibrant in naturalism and feeling. Between observation and idealism, he creates as space for at once rationality and ambiguity. Human instinct comes and goes, but the imagination resumes its sway.

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