Sublime Poussin

Summary

"Art history and art theory are inseparable. A history of art can be achieved only through the simultaneous construction of a theory of art." These words of the eminent scholar and critic Louis Marin suggest why he considered the paintings and the writings of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), painter and theoretician of painting, an enduring source of inspiration. Poussin was the artist to whom Marin returned most faithfully over the years. Since Marin did not live to write his proposed book on Poussin, the ten major essays in this volume will remain his definitive statement on the painter who inspired his most eloquent and probing commentary. At the center of Marin's inquiry into Poussin's art are the theory and practice of "reading" paintings. Rather than explicate Poussin's work through systematic textual and iconographic analysis, he sets out to explore a cluster of speculative questions about the meaning of pictorial art: Can painting be a discourse? If so, how can that discourse be deciphered? Marin's horizon for interpreting Poussin depends more on the concepts of aesthetic philosophy and the insights of cultural history than on an account of the painter's career or his relationship with his artistic predecessors. For example, he positions several of Poussin's best-known landscapes with respect both to French seventeenth-century debates on the question of the sublime and to the philosophical tradition of reflection on the sublime. Among the topics Marin studies are the tempest as a major figure of the sublime in Poussin's work, the presence of ruins in the paintings, Poussin's use of the concept of metamorphosis, and the frequent presence of sleeping bodies in the work. The Poussin who emerges in these essays is preeminently a philosopher-artist whose painterly discourse embodies the limits of thought and of representation.

List of Illustrations and Tables

Introduction

(4)

PART I: "READ THE STORY AND THE PICTURE"

(138)

1 Reading a Picture from 1639 according to a Letter by Poussin

(24)

2 Description of the Image: Concerning a Landscape by Poussin

(37)

3 Description of a Painting and the Sublime in Painting: Concerning a Poussin Landscape and Its Subject

(38)

4 Panofsky and Poussin in Arcadia

104

(16)

5 The Classical Sublime: "Tempests" in Some Landscapes by Poussin

120

(23)

PART II: "GREAT THEORY AND PRACTICE ALLIED"

143

(82)

6 Fragments of a Walk through Poussin's Ruins

143

(9)

7 Awakening Metamorphoses: Poussin, 1625-1635

152

(19)

8 A Gaze Rewarded, or Moses Saved from the Water

171

(12)

9 Variations on an Absent Portrait: Poussin's Self-Portraits, 1649-1650

183

(26)

10 The Sublime in the 1670s: Something Indefinable, a "Je Ne Sais Quoi"?

209

(16)

Appendix 1: `Sublime Poussin' (Louis Marin's summary outline, 1988)

225

(3)

Appendix 2: Letter to Chantelou, 28 April 1639

228

(2)

Appendix 3: Letter to Chantelou, 24 November 1647

230

(7)

Notes

237

(23)

Works Cited

260

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