Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
from Metropolitan Museum of Art
The work of the great French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) is most often associated with classically inspired settings and figures depicting solemn scenes from mythology or the Bible. Yet he also created some of the most influential landscapes in Western art, endowing them with a poetic quality that has been admired by artists as different as Constable, Turner, and Cézanne. As the British critic William Hazlitt noted in 1844, “This great and learned man might be said to see nature through the glass of time.”
This beautiful catalogue presents the first in-depth examination of Poussin’s landscapes. Featured here are more than 40 paintings, ranging from the artist’s early Venetian-inspired pastorals to his grandly structured and austere works, designed as metaphors or allegories for the processes of nature. Also included are approximately 60 drawings and essays by internationally renowned scholars who examine the painter’s visual, literary, and philosophical influences as well as his relationships with his patrons and his place in the art-historical canon.
Nicolas Poussin: 1594-1665 (Basic Art)
by Henry Keazor
from Taschen
Sublime Poussin (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)
by Louis Marin
from Stanford University Press
At the center of Marins inquiry into Poussins art are the theory and practice of "reading" paintings. Rather than explicate Poussins work through systematic textual and iconographic analysis, he sets out to explore a cluster of speculative questions about the meaning of pictorial art: Can painting be a discourse? If so, how can that discourse be deciphered? Marins horizon for interpreting Poussin depends more on the concepts of aesthetic philosophy and the insights of cultural history than on an account of the painters career or his relationship with his artistic predecessors. For example, he positions several of Poussins best-known landscapes with respect both to French seventeenth-century debates on the question of the sublime and to the philosophical tradition of reflection on the sublime.
Among the topics Marin studies are the tempest as a major figure of the sublime in Poussins work, the presence of ruins in the paintings, Poussins use of the concept of metamorphosis, and the frequent presence of sleeping bodies in the work. The Poussin who emerges in these essays is preeminently a philosopher-artist whose painterly discourse embodies the limits of thought and of representation.
Poussin Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonne
by Christopher Wright
from Chaucer Press
Born in Normandy in 1594, Poussin was in his early twenties before his interest in the arts led him to Rome. He detached himself from the popular Baroque movement of his native school, choosing instead to echo the monumentality and classical clarity of the Renaissance. Poussin's influences, from the sensuous renderings of Titian to the later, bolder themes of antiquity, mythology and religion produced an impressive collection of paintings ranging from The Worship of the Golden Calf (c.1634) to Four Seasons (c.1664, painted shortly before his death in 1665). All his works testified to a strong classical idiom and, though Poussin did not live to see his style accepted, his combination of clarity and logic strongly influenced classically oriented artists such as Benjamin West, Jacques-Louis David and Paul Cézanne. In this revealing study, illustrated in full color, Christopher Wright, charts Poussin's stylistic development in 17th century Rome from his experimental early pictures through to the uncompromising works of his later years. In the last twenty years at least a dozen new paintings have come to light, including the spectacular Sack of the Temple of Jerusalem by the Roman Emperor Titus, now in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Wright presents considered arguments on the interpretation of Poussin's corpus of paintings as well as the violent controversies surrounding the authenticity of many of them.
Drawings of Poussin (Master Draughtsman Series)
from Borden Pub Co
Poussin and France: Painting, Humanism, and the Politics of Style
by Todd P. Olson
from Yale University Press
Nicolas Poussin, perhaps the most famous French painter of the seventeenth century, lived and worked for many years in Rome. Yet he remained deeply engaged with cultural and political transformations occurring in France, argues Todd P. Olson in this original exploration of Poussin's paintings, their production, and their reception. Poussin's references to ancient literature and sculpture addressed a political elite-the Robe nobility-whose humanist education in classical antiquity equipped them to relate Greek and Roman history to contemporary events and to deploy ancient precedents in legalistic and political arguments. When the French civil war known as the Fronde erupted in the middle of the seventeenth century, the paintings that Poussin exported to France responded directly in both subject and style to the crisis in monarchical authority and the disenfranchisement of his Robe patrons. Olson demonstrates that Poussin's association with a disgraced political group, his loss of official support, and his exile in Italy imbued his history paintings with a symbolic weight. The painter's audience considered the hard-earned pleasures of his restrained, difficult pictorial style a benchmark of integrity as well as a criticism of the Regency's indiscriminate collecting practices and taste for foreign luxury. Poussin transformed the easel painting-its making and collection-into an expression of cultural and political commitments binding a community. Olson's fresh insights reveal the importance of this painter's work to a learned and powerful French constituency at a critical moment in French history and demonstrate that Poussin's famously timeless style was far more responsive to historical contingencies than has been previously recognized
Poussin and the Poetics of Painting: Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso
by Jonathan Unglaub
from Cambridge University Press
Torquato Tasso's poetic discourses were the most important source for Poussin's theory of painting. The poet's ideas on artistic imitation, novelty, and plot structure and unity, which are exemplified in his epic La Gerusalemme liberata, proved to be fundamental to the artist's conception of narrative painting, culminating in the Israelites Gathering Manna. Offering new interpretations of his works, this book also investigates Poussin's larger literary culture and how this context illuminates the artist's response to contemporary poetic texts, especially in his mythological paintings.
This book examines how Poussin cultivated a poetics of painting from the literary culture of his own time, and especially through his response to the work of Torquato Tasso. Tasso's poetic discourses were the most important source for Poussin's theory of painting. Poussin does not merely illustrate Tasso's verse, but cultivates pictorial means to refashion the poet's metaphors of desire. Offering new interpretations of these works, this book also investigates Poussin's larger literary culture and how this context illuminates the artist's response to contemporary poetic texts, especially in his mythological paintings.
Nicolas Poussin
by Elizabeth Cropper
from Princeton University Press
By investigating the important cultural figures who were close to the painter Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey allow the reader to enter not only the Rome where he lived but also the Rome of antiquity, which he admired and tried to reconstruct. The authors argue that Poussin's works were structured by his friendships, as well as by his study of ancient history and early Christian archaeology, his exploration of the poetry and mystery of ancient places, and his conception of his paintings as gifts rather than commercial objects. By looking into this rich background, they also show how Poussin introduced into his theory and practice of painting a new concept of the inherent expressiveness of form that was quite different from the then prevailing conventions for depicting the passions and affections.
The first two chapters treat Vincenzo Giustiniani, the most sophisticated patron and art collector of his day, whose purpose and rationale for collecting ancient sculpture deeply influenced Poussin and the Flemish sculptor Francois Duquesnoy. Among other topics, the succeeding sections take up Poussin's deep readings of Montaigne and his friendships with the poet Giovanni Battista Marino, with artists such as Pietro Testa and Matteo Zaccolini, and with patrons and true friends, among them Cassiano dal Pozzo and Paul Fréart de Chantelou, for whom Poussin painted a special self-portrait, which the artist said stood for "The Love of Painting and Friendship."
To Destroy Painting
by Louis Marin
from University Of Chicago Press
Poussin: Works on Paper
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