ART: Decorum and Fury

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For Poussin, the real contained the ideal. He did not generalize like an academic classicist. His paintings are full of precisely observed detail -- pebbles and flowers, plants and springs of water. The atmosphere in which forms are bathed is real, whether it's the blue silken light of spring in the Roman campagna or the thick darkness that envelops a landscape when a storm gathers and lightning strikes. (The dramatic mystery of Poussin's foul-weather scenes carries you back to Giorgione's Tempesta.) The architecture of his backgrounds evokes a perfect antiquity, embedded in Nature but not disfigured by Time; and when he paints fragments, as in the great late landscapes with St. John on Patmos or St. Matthew writing his gospel, their forms -- prism, cylinder, cone -- transcend their ruined state by turning into a sort of ideal geometry.

Poussin also found a special relationship between architecture and the human body. On his return to France, Poussin visited Nimes (as Thomas Jefferson would, 150 years later) to admire its Roman temple, the so-called Maison Carree. "The beautiful girls you will have seen at Nimes," he wrote to Chantelou, "will not, I am sure, delight your spirits less than the sight of the beautiful columns ... since the latter are only ancient copies of the former." One of his finest late paintings, Eliezer and Rebecca, 1649, was conceived in exactly this spirit. Nowhere, perhaps, in 17th century painting is there a more beautiful frieze of figures than this row of 13 women, whose poses combine classic dignity with a sharp sense of the vernacular. Gravity, surprise, curiosity, slight bewilderment -- a whole repertoire of expression is set forth in their faces and bodies, and by the time one's eye has stopped traversing the rhythmic garland of their gestures, one realizes what a master of stagecraft Poussin was.

His theater isn't realist, like Caravaggio's, but it is based on a codification of reality, a formal, elevated representation of passion and thought. In this he was absolutely French -- the contemporary of Pierre Corneille, whose tragedies revolved around ideas of free will, exemplary virtue and conflicts between desire and duty, enacted by characters from a classical past who spoke ardently and directly to a 17th century audience. Rome made Poussin; but after him, Rome could no longer condescend to Paris. By the time of his death, he had helped create an irreversible shift in the cultural balance of Europe.