Nicolas Poussin

Poussin was also introduced through Marino to patrons Cardinal Francesco Barberini and Cassiano dal Pozzo, the extraordinary archaeologist, philosopher, and naturalist employed by the Barberini family. Marino’s unexpected exile to Naples in 1627 left Poussin to make his own way in his newly adapted city. He became part of the intellectual world around Cassiano, who helped secure the artist’s only papal commission, the Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus (1628) in the Basilica of Saint Peter. This, however, was not a critical success and was the last altarpiece Poussin painted in Rome.

Poussin’s style rapidly evolved, as did his repertoire of subject matter. By 1627 he painted the multifigured scene from Roman history, the Death of Germanicus (Minneapolis Institute of Art), a stoical multifugural composition set in a sombre architectural interior as well as complex and violent battle paintings such as The Battle of Gideon against the Midianites (Vatican Museums). From the ensuing decade come a golden series of extraordinary lyrical works of unparalleled elegance coupled with emotional intensity, notable among them the Diana and Endymion (Detroit, Institute of Arts), the Empire of Flora (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden) and the Inspiration of the Poet (Musée du Louvre, Paris).

Gradually, Poussin’s work developed into more cleanly drawn and strictly ordered compositions deploying a cool but rich palette, fluid brushwork, graceful gestures, and motifs drawn from ancient artefacts. Two projects from the mid 1630s epitomise this direction, the great Seven Sacraments painted for Cassiano del Pozzo painted in the mid 1630s, a profound expression of the deepest aspirations and emotions of the human spirit at the critical moments of every man’s life. At the same time Poussin painted for Cardinal Richelieu in 1636 The Triumph of Pan (National Gallery, London) and the Triumph of Bacchus (Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City), an entirely different project intended to hang next to pagan subjects by Mantegna. Already, however, one sees a greater weight in the figures, a more emphatically classical line and a more sophisticated and expressive use of color.

In the 1640–42, Poussin makes his only return journey to France where he is now painting for the King and high-ranking courtiers, notably Fréart de Chanteloup. Throughout this mature phase Poussin paints a wide range of subjects, mythologies, religious subjects and landscapes. Perhaps his greatest works are the penumbral second series of Seven Sacraments (Bridgewater Collection, Edinburgh) commissioned by Chanteloup. He is also increasingly interested in a more rigorous, formally planned type of landscape in which man’s presence in nature is emphasised. Examples of such monumental landscapes include the Ashes of Phocion (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) and the Calm (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles). The Poussin scholar Anthony Blunt describes them as expressing the ‘Parallel between the two productions of human reason: the harmony of nature and the virtue of man’.

The last decades of Poussin’s career see a decline in his ability to draw and paint the human figure and a tendency to focus on the formal elements of composition and color. Although his figural compositions retain a powerful and sophisticated expression of classical affetti it is in Poussin’s late landscapes, the Landscape with Diana and Orion(Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and the Four Seasons (Musée du Louvre, Paris) that we most enjoy Poussin’s final embrace of what Brigstocke termed his ‘pantheistic vision of the universe, rooted in a sense of the fertility of nature, the fecundity of man and the destructive power of the elements’.