ART: Decorum and Fury

(3 of 4)

The 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, a set of figures, or a structure of tonal relationships, bluntly set down in strokes of the pen and unfussed dabs of ink wash. For the sensuous side of Poussin one must consult the paintings, in all their majesty of color: the ultramarine blues, vermilions, gold-yellows, unfurled against the softer tones of nature.

He never took antiquity for granted, as Italians were apt to. He always seems to have thought of it as a marvelous spectacle that he, as a foreigner, was privileged to behold. "Questo giovane ha una furia del diavolo," remarked Marino, introducing him to one Roman patron -- This young man has the fury of a devil. Furia didn't simply mean rage; it suggested a state of inspiration, of contact with primeval forces that lie below the surface of culture -- the war god's frenzy, the satyr's beastliness, the erotic abandon of the maenad.

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, lie in Raphael. With its structure of color, bound by a repeated accent of red, with its perspective lines, its golden- section ratios, its echoes and reversals of pose and gesture, and the contrast of the milling crowd of figures with the stately columns of the temple, it is an incredibly complicated pictorial machine. The chaos of its violence has a dreamlike clarity. But the cruelty and amazement in it transfigure the abstraction of Poussin's system. The bound Jew and the severed heads on the ground are fearsome in their concreteness. Titus on his white horse and the soldiers near him have seen something in the sky, but what? A sign of God's wrath? No explanation.

It's the 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's arm resting on the lyre, the physical beauty of the Muse, the crispness of her yellow-and-white drapery.