Poussin [antikvár]

The work of Nicolas Poussin is unusually vast. The Catalogue drawn up by Jacques Thuillier1 comprises the titles of 224 oil paintings on canvas as well as of a large number of other pictures attributed to him (mentioned in an Appendix). He is alsó the author of numerous drawings. Cataloguing and classifying his work becomes even more difficult as the dates of most of his paintings are not certain for there exist several widely different chronological lists. Seldom did Poussin date and sign his works. The few cases when he did so (The Adoration oj the Golden Calf, 1629, Self-Portrait, 1649 and a few others) are therefore the only firm landmarks in establishing a generál chronology. One example, among many others - when going through a catalogue of Poussin's work, one is struck by the permanent incertitude of the dates - illustrates these oscillations and differences: the date when he completed one of his best-known painting, Bt in Arcadia Ego (the second variant, today at the Louvre) is 1638--39 according to Gramtoff, 1640-42 according to Friedlánder, 1640 according to Mahon, 1650-55 according to Blunt, 1638-39 according to Thuillier 2. As laboratory analyses are not always conclusive, when dating his paintings one often resorts to such criteria as the "manner" and "style" of the painter, though they too were insufficiently and unequally defined. Under such conditions it is an external criterion, i.e. a few important moments in his life, that could be considered consistent enough when attempting to establish the periods of Poussin's artistic creation. Based on the painter's biography, this criterion is coherent enough. In a way, the extrapolation of biography and work is quite possible, as the only spectacular events in Poussin's life are his works; this becomes obvious in his Lettcrs as well, which are a diary describing his creation and a treatise on poetics. In 1624, when he left Paris for the first time renouncing a rapid but factitious career - official and fashionable - to settle in Romé where he was to live all his life (except for a brief period he spent in Paris) and where he was to die, the Eternal City was still the mythical place where artists the world over came to learn their trade. Romé was for Poussin both a school and a refuge, the neutral place where he could build up his work in a kind of deliberate spiritual anonvmity which secured his freedom as an artist, and a protection against the influence of his family and against the rivalry of his fellow-painters at home, against the demands of the French Royal Court. We call it a "neutral place" because - as seen in the Letters too - though he married a lady of Romé, this city was never a second homeland for him: living in an isolation he guarded jealously so as to devote all his time to his work, he was to remain - here the same as in his own family and in his country when he was a child, then an adolescent - a "stranger", estranged from the life around him, far from it, in a space of his own favourable to a deep contemplation of the world the way he was to express it in his theories when meditating on his own painting. Our thesis regarding the "anonymous" character of his life is alsó confirmed by Poussin's unwillingness to paint self-portraits: the only two he has left are exceptions to a rule he had forced upon himself. The comparative anonymity of his empiric everyday life and ego emphasizes, by contrast, the peculiarities of another "biography", of his deeper, creative 3 self, a biography which is a poetics in fact. The characteristic features of the Lettcrs which form a valuable 'metatext' as compared to the pictorial "text" - a 'metatext' created from the inside, during his artistic activity - as well as the existence of direct evidence (conversations with Poussin noted by the painter's acquaintances, who became his first exegetes) on the way Poussin perceived his relationship with his work, are very helpful in the type of investigation (poietic as a matter of fact) which is going