Nicolas Poussin

Nicolas Poussin (b. 1594–d. 1665) is among the most pivotal painters in European art history. His oeuvre marks the culmination of the antique revival of the Renaissance and initiates the academic tradition of history painting that held sway over official art for the next two centuries. Born in Les Andelys, Normandy, Poussin received a humanistic education delaying his artistic training. After some belated success in Paris, Poussin left in 1623 for Rome. His early works are sensuous idylls and mythological paintings in a Titianesque style. These attracted the renowned antiquarian and naturalist Cassiano dal Pozzo, secretary to Cardinal Barberini (nephew of Pope Urban VIII), who became a steadfast patron and true intellectual mentor. Apart from occasional altarpieces, Poussin focused on modestly scaled narrative pictures of Biblical and classical subjects for a private clientele, steeped in the knowledge of antiquity. Poussin increasingly looked to Raphael’s works as models of compositional clarity and dramatic legibility. Perhaps the two series of the Seven Sacraments for Dal Pozzo and later French patron Paul Fréart de Chantelou best exemplify this approach, drawing upon paleo-Christian archaeology to stage the originating event of each rite. Cardinal Richelieu summoned Poussin back to France to serve King Louis XIII in 1640. In Paris, he was inundated with prestigious large-scale commissions ill-suited to his temperament. After less than two years Poussin returned to Rome. There he devoted himself wholly to the pursuit of his art, on his own terms, with the support of dedicated French private patrons. The artist had so thoroughly absorbed the forms of classical art, and was so steeped in ancient history, myth, and topography, that his paintings seem like recreations from that era. He also applied this knowledge to an ambitious conception of landscape. Poussin used nature, restructured through an innate sense of rational order, to give history and fable a universal resonance. Despite the Italian, especially Roman, foundation of his art, Poussin’s legacy was largely French. Under Louis XIV, the Académie royale privileged his works as paragons to express stories and ideas clearly. Thus canonized, Poussin’s works remained a touchstone for artistic emulation and theoretical discussion for centuries. The basis of Poussin studies is an exceptional richness of primary documentation—nearly two hundred letters, four detailed contemporary biographies (including by the influential theorists Giovanni Pietro Bellori and André Félibien), and extensive appreciation and analysis of his works in French Académie lectures, critical writings, and art treatises. In the subsequent centuries, some of the most influential art writers, such as Diderot, Reynolds, and Delacroix, and painters ranging from David to Cézanne have upheld Poussin as exemplary. The antiquarian rigor, classical legacy, range of subject matter, poetic eloquence, and refined formal construction of Poussin’s works have attracted high caliber scholarship by leading specialists in 17th-century art, as well as art historians and theorists from adjacent fields.