Decorum and Fury

By ROBERT HUGHES

The big fall event of the French museums is the retrospective of Nicolas Poussin at the Grand Palais in Paris, marking the 400th anniversary of the painter's birth. The visitor is warned: this is not an easy show, and given the queues outside and the crowds within, it taxes the concentration of even the hardiest gallerygoer. It contains 245 paintings and preparatory drawings -- a fearsome demonstration of the borrowing power of Pierre Rosenberg, the show's chief organizer, who runs the Louvre's department of paintings. One may even wonder whether it is addressed to a general public at all. But for specialists it is a gold mine, offering the chance to compare one work with another that only comes, at most, once in a generation. The last big Poussin show in France was in 1960, at the Louvre, and he has never had a full retrospective in America.

Ordinary mortals may find themselves succumbing to a kind of ennui auguste by the time they come to the end of the exhibition. But this has always been part of the experience of scaling Mount Poussin. "Some people blame him for having gone a little too far in his austere and precise manner," wrote the poet Charles Perrault in 1700, "but others maintain that these defects are nothing other than beauties which are a little too great for unaccustomed eyes." Among those "others" have been most of the best French artists of the past two centuries -- not only the classicists like Ingres, for whom Poussin's lucidity and intellectual control were a model, but more romantic ones as well, from Delacroix to Picasso, all of whom sensed the depth of response to the world that lay below the surface of the painter's art. "Each time I go to him," said Cezanne, "I know better who I am."

There is no point in pretending that Poussin is an easy painter for today's viewers to get at. He has the disadvantage, for a coarsely expressionist culture, of being incapable of vulgarity or cheap sentiment. His pictures don't reach out across 3 1/2 centuries to diddle your heartstrings. His imagery springs from qualities of feeling and modes of thought that are now almost extinct: educated piety, allegory and complete familiarity not only with the Bible and the Greek and Latin classics from Homer to Ovid, Horace and Plutarch, but also with their Renaissance descendants, such as Tasso.

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.

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.

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.