Poussin and Egypt

Abstract

The prospect of antiquity lies at the heart of Nicolas Poussin's painting. Yet the nature of Poussin's vision of the classical past, although much clarified by recent study, still awaits full definition. Poussin was the friend of scholars, and he used the fruits of their studies in his own work; but he was also a poet. Unlike many of his followers, Poussin was not mesmerized by learning. He was as awed as they were by the remains of classical greatness, but he never forgot the more important spirit which gave those monuments birth. It is my intent to shed some light on Poussin's apprehension of the classical spirit by examining one aspect of his approach to antiquity, the so-called archaeological element of his work. It has long been remarked that one of Poussin's chief preoccupations in creating the settings and incidental business of his paintings was the desire to reconstruct the archaeological aspect of the past, so that all details might be appropriate to the narrative.1 Blunt has discussed this in some detail, commenting that Poussin seems to be motivated by the wish to create a setting in which “even the most learned of his contemporaries could find no anachronism.”2 The errors that do appear in the archaeological fabric of Poussin's paintings Blunt attributes either to a knowledge of classical styles less complete than we possess today, or to such related errors as the association, for example, of the architectural orders with hypothetical places of origin. Although this is true, it is an insufficient description of Poussin's use of archaeological elements in the formal and narrative structure of his paintings. For in the study of antiquity no less than of nature, Poussin converted the aspect of his primary evidence, by a process of considered study, into a more personal rational synthesis. Rather, Poussin's archaeological inaccuracies provide indispensable guides to the nature of his emotional and intellectual re-creation of antiquity. And occasionally, as we shall see, such inconsistencies turn out to be not the products of ignorance, but guides to a perception of antiquity more profound than mere scene-setting accuracy.

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