Painting: Luminous Logician

Nicolas Poussin was to painting what his 17th century contemporary Descartes was to philosophy: a believer in reason above all. An architect with canvas, he organized his scenes like luminous lessons in logic, seeing structure where skin was and portraying fleshy maenads as marble caryatids. His discipline twice earned him the title of First Painter to the King of France — and the respect of every generation in art.

Cezanne claimed that all he wished to do was “revive Poussin in the contact with nature.” Even Picasso, using Poussin as a pianist might an exercise in arpeggios, steadied his nerves by copying one of the past master’s works while gunfire echoed through the streets of Paris in 1944.

Today, 300 years after his death, a recent critical biography -by the U.S.’s most venerable art historian, Walter Friedlaender, 93, sums up Poussin’s continuing appeal. One conclusion is that his frankly intellectual art is just as much a visible feast as it is brain food.

Nothing to Chance. For all his discipline, Poussin was in no sense a stony prude or a bloodless geometrist. He reveled in depicting bacchanalia where swarthy satyrs lurched after alabaster-skinned nymphs, and chubby putti chugged wine as if it were rosy Pablum —all composed as carefully as a ballet. In his Rape of the Sabine Women (see opposite page), swords and outflung arms set up triangles that play a counterpoint against the squarish architecture. Nothing is left to chance, not even the suggestive but studied pas de deux of the Sabine maidens and their Roman abductors.

“My nature forces me to search for well-ordered things,” said Poussin, and he found his order in Greco-Roman antiquity. Of provincial birth in Normandy, he was not able until the age of 30 to get to Rome, the world’s art capital during his lifetime. There he sketched ancient ruins, read the classic Latin poetry of Ovid, dissected cadavers to learn anatomy, copied the works of Raphael.

Never Too Exuberant. Finally, in 1627 a commission from a cardinal made Poussin’s name. King Louis XIII pressured him into returning to paint for the glory of France. Under the orders of Cardinal Richelieu, Poussin was pestered with jobs to do what he called “mere bagatelles”—fireplaces, frontispiece designs, cabinet decor. After two years of royal daubing in France, he fled for good to Rome, where he quietly painted what he pleased until his death in 1665.

Unlike the exuberant, often excessive Italian baroque artists around him, Poussin stripped his paintings down to cool, hard, brightly colored figures gesturing like stagecraft as he recounted his fables. The narrative content of his art instantly made him a mentor for dull academic followers who found cartooning easier than esthetics. But he alone knew how to manifest the inward emotions of his mythical people in outward physical postures. While Narcissus, for example, gazes in the rapturous vanity of youth at his own reflection in a pool, his forgotten lover Echo, is depicted in ashen tones and fuzzy contours, as if evaporating from neglect.

One of the few instances where Poussin painted a living person, for portraiture was then considered a lowly form, was his self-portrait of 1650. With an intimation of the coming romantic age, he cloaks himself in an academic gown, accouters himself with a book, and poses against pictures whose gilt edges focus attention especially on his eyes. It is clearly the portrait of the artist as rational philosopher, saying with Cartesian clarity: I perceive, therefore I paint.

* Poussin: A New Approach. 204 pages. 48 color plates. Harry N. Abrams, Inc. $20.