ART: Decorum and Fury

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Poussin's pictorial thought -- for he was, supremely, a thinking painter, to whom ratiocination was the very breath of creativity -- was formed by two powerful influences. One was the ideas of the Counterreformation, spearheaded by the Jesuits, who called for clarity and vividness in sacred images. The other was the legacy of ancient Rome -- the immense residue of form and narrative from the classical past. There seems to be no evidence one way or the other about Poussin's religious life or the strength of his faith. Probably he was neither pious nor a freethinker, but a stoic who could, when required, perform as a remarkable religious painter, as the second series of his The Seven Sacraments shows. His early Martyrdom of St. Erasmus, 1628, sticks in the mind because it is such a singular combination of ferocity and decorum -- the torture of a saint by evisceration, a live man's guts being drawn out on a windlass, yet with the shock of the blood edited away or, rather, subliminally transferred to a cascade of red drapery below Erasmus' body. In his work, pagan antiquity and 17th century Catholicism eloquently support each other.

The two 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 which Louis XIII tried to persuade France's top cultural expatriate to stay home. His blandishments failed. Poussin was quite content to accept commissions from royal courtiers -- notably from the Sieur deChantelou, a close and admiring friend to whom most of his surviving letters were addressed -- but he despised the French art world. French painters, in his eyes, were strapazzoni, careless hacks, "who make a sport of turning out a picture in 24 hours."

Worse, there wasn't the protein in France to feed his imagination. It only existed in Rome: the presence of the recent masters from whom he learned so ! much, like Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci, and the dead ones to whom he owed even more, like Titian and Raphael; the enlightened patronage of such 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.