Nicolas Poussin: Landscape Idea

Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Calm (Un Tem[p]s calme et serein), 1650-1. Oil on canvas, 97 x 131 cm. Courtesy: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Many people ask me why I have devoted so many years of my life studying French painter Nicolas Poussin. In Brazil, only one of his works is available, Hymenaios Disguised as a Woman During an Offering to Priapus (1634-8), as part of the MASP collection. It is probably the only work by him in any Latin American museum.

My interest in Poussin was certainly not motivated by regular contact with his paintings, but by their standing in Western art. Poussin is a giant. He was one of the most appreciated artists in Rome, where he lived and worked for forty years, and the ultimate reference in 17th-Century French art. Great painters followed his path, among them David, Ingres, Cézanne, and Picasso.

I was attracted to the mystification around Poussin. In my research on the origins of art criticism in the 1700s, I found countless references to Poussin. In Diderot’s Salons—about which I have just published an article, Poussin was mentioned as a model for artists, the “perfect painter.”

After just a few months of work, I understood just how much trouble I had set up for myself. Poussin died in 1665, and he has been studied since then. What has been written about him is as monumental as his work. What could I say about him that had not already been investigated and debated by the world’s most learned critics? What a responsibility!

I’m a trained philosopher and I’ve had an interest in art since I was a kid. I discovered rhetoric when I first started my graduate studies, and I found the key to analyze the painting genres Poussin pursued through getting to know more and more about the mechanisms of appropriation of rhetoric precepts in art discourse.

Beyond history, in his many subgenres, Poussin painted landscapes that he invented. In the treaties I’ve read, landscape scenes were often described as ornaments, not as an autonomous genre ruled by specific guidelines. Among Poussin biographers—persons who occupied the most distinguished positions in the artistic milieu in the 1600s—there weren’t mentions to these paintings either; they were evoked due to the action they depicted, not because of their composition singularity. In Rome where Poussin worked there were landscape painters who did not exercise historical painting, therefore, they were seen as lesser artists by their contemporary theoreticians. Inversely, in that context, it would be impossible to recognize that Poussin painted landscapes without him being demoted from his position as master.

These findings led me to realize that there was something misunderstood in Poussin’s art. Why did he paint landscapes? What principles did he observe in order to conceive such compositions? What is their place in the whole of his work? Why weren’t they recognized by their genre?

My book Nicolas Poussin: Ideia da paisagem (Landscape Idea) proposes answers to these questions and shows how the artist contributed to build a genre that would guide the work of countless painters for over three centuries and inspire a consolidated garden model in 18th-century England that to this day echoes in the landscaping of parks around the world.

More than twenty years have passed since I got my PhD. Today I’m happy to launch this exquisitely edited book by Edusp publishers. Felipe Chaimovich wrote the copy for the flaps and back cover, which can be read below. You can buy the book through Edusp’s online store. 

The open classabout Poussin’s landscape paintings I gave at he launching is available herefor. 

About Nicolas Poussin: Landscape Idea

By Felipe Chaimovich, PhD

In this surprising, enlightening volume, philosopher and art critic Magnólia Costa reshapes our comprehension of Western landscape painting. She presents how painter Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) definitively changed the stature of landscapes as artistic genre by adding a heroic character to his carefully designed scenes. To this end, he equipped himself with the repertoire of philosophers, studying and following precepts of ancient and modern thinkers who guided scholarly debates in Rome and Paris in the mid-1600s. Poussin gave a voice to landscape painting by being a strict follower of rules.

            This change in landscape painting’s history conferred Poussin with a central role in the development of this genre at the Paris Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, as he was the ultimate model to be followed at the institution, the very definition and hierarchic categorization of Western academic art since the 1650s. The author goes through and analyzes academic debate and its references, the circle of Poussin’s patrons and their secret codes, and setting devices the painter used to create his compositions. This book highlights Poussin’s search for concepts or ideas as principles for works of art, for design that organizes and guides execution, for compliance with the masters’ guidelines. His rigor created an unprecedented cornerstone that enriched landscape painting as a genre.

 The wealth of research sources is reflected in generous notes collected at the end of the volume, containing excerpts in their original languages, translations, and comments. Therefore, this book may be dynamically read or complemented through consulting the notes; the relevance of the quoted excerpts also justifies the book’s aim to be a compilation of the greatest references in academic art.

 This work illustrates this fascinating intellectual and artistic journey by presenting an encompassing gallery of works by Poussin and by other painters of his time, examined in the light of the concepts that guided dialogues at their time: ideas, design, color, art genres, creativity, enjoyment. Moving between rigid rules and new paradigms, a vivid portrait of the artist who modernized landscape painting history and impacted even Cézanne emerges.