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Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting - Review
Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 1998 by David Carrier
Sheila McTighe's Nicolas Poussin's Landscape Allegories develops in a challengingly extreme way Blunt's suggestion that identifying the artist's relationship with the libertins, those secret heretics "who hid their actual beliefs behind a mask of political and religious orthodoxy" (p. 23), explains his late art. Looking closely at a small group of landscape scenes, she argues that they are best understood as political commentaries which only these initiates would have been able to decipher. As she admits, her claim is tricky. That Poussin had friends who were libertins, or close to the libertins, does not necessarily imply that he expressed such ideas in his art. Indeed, if Landscape with Orpheus, for example, is not only about its literal subject, but also about French politics of the day, then that could not have been said. As McTighe writes, "one thing that interests me about this painting is the silence that surrounds it from the very first" (p. 54). Poussin's paintings can be appreciated aesthetically - they are very beautiful - but because their subjects now often have become obscure, they require iconographic study. However, there is no direct evidence that Poussin or his patrons were interested in painted political commentaries, and any pictorial elements may also in obvious ways be given allegorical significance - as, for example, when McTighe identifies the ship in Landscape with Orpheus as the ship of state. Accordingly, we might want to ask, what is the basic criterion controlling her interpretation?
Allegorical interpretation is characteristically motivated by recognizing that a picture is obscure or illogical when viewed as a naturalistic representation. Landscape with Orpheus, McTighe argues, "is an odd painting in several respects, not just because of the motifs it includes, but also because of the way Poussin lays out the well-known tragedy of Orpheus" (p. 56). The painting represents two distinct events, the wedding of Orpheus and Eurydice and Eurydice's death. Behind them we see a burning castle. Iconographers seek textual sources to explain such manifest oddities. McTighe's different, more ambitious, concern is to identify not just the content of Poussin's pictures, but also the very way that he presents this content - what she calls "libertin modes of representation" (p. 136). Some late pictures are hieroglyphic allegories - natural signs that "can be understood intuitively by their viewer" (p. 154). These paintings in which "the artist turned away from any pictorial unity. of time and subject, out of a desire to recreate the sequential unfolding of letters, words and stories in a text" (pp. 178-79) are thus very odd images - unlike mere representations, which depict some scene we might imagine viewing. A hieroglyph, showing transparently to the initiated meanings to which the ordinary observer is blind, would be ideal for libertins, who were concerned with esoteric knowledge. Poussin's art displays "pictorial expression of concepts that could be conveyed to the viewer directly, by swift intuition rather than by the long-drawn-out means of discursive thought" (p. 88). Today, when this view of signs is impossible to take literally, and very difficult to reconstruct, Poussin's art has become extremely hard to understand.
