Poussin And The Poetics Of Painting

This book examines how Poussin cultivated a poetics of painting from the literary culture of his own time, and especially through his response to the work of Torquato Tasso. Tasso's poetic discourses were the most important source for Poussin's theory of painting. Poussin does not merely illustrate Tasso's verse, but cultivates pictorial means to refashion the poet's metaphors of desire. Offering new interpretations of these works, this book also investigates Poussin's larger literary culture and how this context illuminates the artist's response to contemporary poetic texts, especially in his mythological paintings.

"The work of the great French painter Nicolas Poussin (15941665) is most often associated with classically inspired settings and figures depicting solemn scenes from mythology or the Bible. Yet he also created some of the most influential landscapes in Western art, endowing them with a poetic quality that has been admired by artists as different as Constable, Turner, and Ce;zanne. As the British critic William Hazlitt noted in 1844, 'This great and learned man might be said to see nature through the glass of time'. This beautiful catalogue presents the first in-depth examination of Poussin's landscapes. Featured here are more than 40 paintings, ranging from the artist's early Venetian-inspired pastorals to his grandly structured and austere works, designed as metaphors or allegories for the processes of nature. Also included are approximately 60 drawings and essays by internationally renowned scholars who examine the painter's visual, literary, and philosophical influences as well as his relationships with his patrons and his place in the art-historical canon."--Publisher description.

Employing the methodologies of the new art history as well as some tools provided by poststructuralism, historiography, and analytic philosophy, Poussin's Paintings offers a novel approach to the art of Poussin. David Carrier begins with a comprehensive analysis of Poussin's self-portraits, which provides the starting point for a critical discussion of the traditional strategies of Poussin scholarship and for an evaluation of the status of this artist. Carrier shows that Poussin can be properly understood only by seeing how his visual and political culture differs from ours. Carrier examines the traditional approaches of Poussin scholars, noting the limitations of their views and showing how they not only shape our image of the artist but also restrict out ability to properly grasp his concerns. Carrier also considers the important conceptual claims of connoisseurs and reveals how their work invokes an implicit theory of Poussin's development. Carrier then focuses on a group of paintings concerned with erotic themes, demonstrating the inadequacy of traditional accounts of these pictures. He extends his analysis to a discussion of Poussin's landscapes, which have a different and more important place in his development than the older accounts claim. Carrier places Poussin within the artistic and political culture of seventeenth-century Rome. He asserts that artists of the time were concerned with the problem of belatedness and that Poussin attempted to return to the tradition of the High Renaissance, reworking images from that tradition in response to his own visual culture. Carrier argues that Poussin's art is thus best understood as a response to that setting for baroque art, and he relates Poussin's work to the later tradition of French history painting.

Nicolas Poussin(1594 - 1665) was undoubtedly a highly significant master of the historical genre. He shaped its aesthetics which, regrettably, subsequently became regarded as a set of hard-and-fast rules (a trap which the Russian followers of the founder of classicism also fell into). We know that Poussin attributed prime significance to the actual choice of matter for depiction, giving preference to subjects which provided food for profound thought. Creatively reworking the aesthetic legacy of the Ancients, he introduced into the realm of painting the concept of the “modus” (mood of depiction), which established the functional unity of three components: the idea, the structure of the depiction, and its perception by the viewer. Composition assumed a predominant significance in his artistic system. In a letter of 1665, Nicolas Poussin put forward three main theses: firstly, painting is simply imitation; secondly, it aims to bring delight; Thirdly, the artist is endowed with a natural talent that no one can give him or deprive him of.

Publication coincides with the 400th anniversary of the artist's birth and a forthcoming exhibition

By investigating the important cultural figures who were close to the painter Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey allow the reader to enter not only the Rome where he lived but also the Rome of antiquity, which he admired and tried to reconstruct. The authors argue that Poussin's works were structured by his friendships, as well as by his study of ancient history and early Christian archaeology, his exploration of the poetry and mystery of ancient places, and his conception of his paintings as gifts rather than commercial objects. By looking into this rich background, they also show how Poussin introduced into his theory and practice of painting a new concept of the inherent expressiveness of form that was quite different from the then prevailing conventions for depicting the passions and affections. The first two chapters treat Vincenzo Giustiniani, the most sophisticated patron and art collector of his day, whose purpose and rationale for collecting ancient sculpture deeply influenced Poussin and the Flemish sculptor Francois Duquesnoy. Among other topics, the succeeding sections take up Poussin's deep readings of Montaigne and his friendships with the poet Giovanni Battista Marino, with artists such as Pietro Testa and Matteo Zaccolini, and with patrons and true friends, among them Cassiano dal Pozzo and Paul Fréart de Chantelou, for whom Poussin painted a special self-portrait, which the artist said stood for "The Love of Painting and Friendship."

Plague was one of the enduring facts of everyday life on the European continent, from earliest antiquity through the first decades of the eighteenth century. It represents one of the most important influences on the development of Europe’s society and culture. In order to understand the changing circumstances of the political, economic, ecclesiastical, artistic, and social history of that continent, it is important to understand epidemic disease and society’s response to it. To date, the largest portion of scholarship about plague has focused on its political, economic, demographic, and medical aspects. This interdisciplinary volume offers greater coverage of the religious and the psychological dimensions of plague and of European society’s response to it through many centuries and over a wide geographical terrain, including Byzantium. This research draws extensively upon a wealth of primary sources, both printed and painted, and includes ample bibliographical reference to the most important secondary sources, providing much new insight into how generations of Europeans responded to this dread disease.

This book explores how traditional relations among the arts have changed in our time, focusing on the radical transformation of Paul Cezanne.