Nicolas Poussin: The measure of Poussin's painting

This is the text of an essay written in early 2006 for a volume edited by David Packwood & Phillippa Plock that, after several attempts to get past the publishing blockade I wrote about earlier today, has finally had to be abandoned.

The argument is in 6,000 words similar to the argument of my much longer book Poussin's Humour written in 2008. I have very lightly emended it today.

The opening section appears below.

The Measure of Poussin’s Painting.

Tony Green

 

On a toujours essayé d’élucider le problème de Poussin à partir d’un examen de ses idées, de ses sources et de ses thèmes, parfois aussi à partir du matériel d’objets dont il s’est inspiré – objets matériels ou objets figuratifs. Or, le problème de Poussin n’est pas un problème des sources, mais un problème de création.

Pierre Francastel, 1958. Colloque Poussin, 1960, I, 202

 

I. The Legacy of Twentieth-Century Poussin Scholarship

Forty years on, there has still been no serious attempt to confront Francastel’s “problème de création”, to solve which he had placed himself “résolument au point de vue plastique.” Instead, the corpus of Nicolas Poussin’s history paintings has attracted a largely hermeneutic, exegetical and philological corpus of writing. Poussin as a painter, brush in hand, barely figures in this commentary. Instead his paintings have been regarded as if they were secondary texts to the primary texts of history, philosophy and literature that he had read. In order to determine his ideas, it has been supposed that what was required was to locate those texts and see through the density of their medium to the statements, propositions and arguments that constitute ideas. To be sure, it was qualified that these ideas were always somewhat modified by Poussin.

Exemplary of this corpus of writing (in English) is Anthony Blunt’s 1967 monograph on Poussin as “peintre-philosophe.”[i] Blunt explicitly rejected “modern” understanding of Poussin as “one of the great masters of formal design.” He set himself to explain, on the “exact contrary”, Poussin’s “thought”, how Poussin “gives visible expression to certain ideas.”[ii] These, he made clear, are ethical and metaphysical ideas, sufficient representations of Poussin’s philosophical world-view. By rejecting Roger Fry’s “extreme” formalist disregard of content, Blunt takes license for an equally extreme disqualification of form. He treats “style” as no more than an adjunct, regarding Poussin’s classicism as a reflection of stoicism. The medium, the means, is squeezed out of consideration, as no more than instrumental. Consequently, everything that Blunt calls ideas is derived from whatever he can isolate in the pictures as narrative and symbol.

The hermeneutic process of interpretation when applied to paintings makes them into pseudo-writing. Though writing is difficult enough as a medium for ideas, painting offers difference. Propositions and arguments are beyond its powers; whilst its expression of narrative is also strictly limited by its medium. The current common opinion is that Poussin’s paintings are merely a specialized topic of philological erudition. Unless and until Francastel’s project is renewed, modified by subsequent theory, it will not be possible to take the measure of Poussin as a painter.[iii]

We might begin with Poussin’s own fundamental definition of painting: “an imitation made with lines and colors on a surface of all that can be seen under the Sun: its purpose is delight.”[iv] Torquato Tasso may be the source for Poussin’s definition of painting: this is a modification of Artistotle’s discussion of drama in the Poetics.[v]

Alain Rey has argued that Aristotle’s term mimesis was restricted in meaning in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, because of the then insistent use for the imitation of an object and its fixation on beauty.[vi] But, as Rey shows, Artistotelian mimesis extended to the arts of dance and flute-playing, which often do not have an object to imitate. Mimesis included both what was represented, the mimemata, and how it was represented, the means or medium, the semeia: rhythmos, logos, and armonia. In painting, Rey notes, these semeia can only be the colors and figures. Omission of the semeia has continually privileged content. This has its roots in the doctrine of the Académie Royale in the 1660s, based on literary and rhetorical theory. The semeia were regarded as elementary craft, an address to the senses, which every guild- member could produce, whereas the Academy’s art addressed the mind, with a rational deployment of rhetorical content.

The modernist alternative of a return to a privileging of form has had little credit in art history, seen as aesthetic - subjective and sensual style-preferences. But Rey’s re-reading of Aristotle, points to a sense of form that has been mistakenly rejected along with formalism. When form is understood as a verb instead of as a noun, artworks can be seen as having been formed in their media, semeia, towards their overall effect of figuration, mimemata. The resultant overall pictorial effect, the look of the picture, sets the terms for the process of seeing in all its inferential complexity.

Form, in this sense, is the necessary fundamental focus of attention of any painter, the trans-formation of colors into figures. The continual assessment of this in a work in progress cannot be based entirely on a lucid theoretical statement formulated in advance. Poussin included a remark to this effect in his observations on painting, on the practice of painting: “OF THE EXAMPLE OF GOOD MASTERS. Even though instruction concerning practice follows the study of theory, unless theoretical precepts are confirmed by evidence they do not impress on the mind the working habits that are the result of practical experience” or scienza fattiva [vii] This scienza fattiva, as painters know, is accumulated by looking at paintings and refining workshop practice. In this regard, painters may be said to think with their painting, as directors of movies think with moving images; as poets think with their poems; or as choreographers, “create their images not in words, but in plastic positions and rhythmic movements.”[viii] The privileging of content misses the crucial engagement of the arts with their media. It hastens to analyze paraphrases of plot, character and symbol; treats media as transparent to what they represent; and ignores the thought that takes place in medium and process.

Few accounts of Poussin’s paintings recognize how the effects of figures are produced. But they rarely begin at the level of the scienza fattiva that has produced the visible. The production by painting of the visible is, in ancient theory, considered as the result of an effort, wonderful in itself, developed from generation to generation. The painting of the invisible, dependent on the painting of the visible, is perhaps the most important measure of history painting in those writings of antiquity respected by Poussin and his contemporaries, in Xenophon, in Pliny the Elder, and in Philostratus.[ix] It is also critically important in our time. W. T. Mitchell writes: “We can never understand a picture unless we grasp the ways in which it shows what cannot be seen. One thing that cannot be seen in an illusionistic picture, or which tends to conceal itself is precisely its own artificiality.”[x]

 

---

[i] Anthony F. Blunt, Nicolas Poussin: The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1958 (London: Phaidon Press, and New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1967).

[ii] See for example, Hubert Damisch., “Huit Thèses pour (ou contre?) une Sémiologie de la Peinture,” Macula, 2 (1977): 17-23.

[iii] Aristotle, “On the Art of Poetry,” in Classical Literary Criticism, ed. and trans. T. S. Dorsch (London: Penguin Books, 1965), 32-33.

[iv] Alain Rey, “Mimesis, Poétique et Iconisme: pour une Relecture d’Aristote,” in Iconicity: Essays on the Nature of Culture, eds. Paul Bouissac, Michael Heizfeld and Roland Posner (Tübingen: Stauffenberg Verlag, 1986), 19.

[v] Floyd Merrell, Pierce, Signs and Meaning (Toronto, Buffalo, London: Toronto University Press, 1997), especially Chapter 15, 315-342

[vi] Alain Rey, “Mimesis, Poétique et Iconisme”

[vii] Printed in Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, 361: “Dell’esempio de’ buoni maestri. Quantunque dopò la dottrina, si agghiungino gl’inseganamenti, che riguardono la pratica, con tutto ciò fino e tanto che li precetti non si veggono autenticati, non lasciano nell’animo quel’habito dell’operare che deue essere l’effetto dell scienza fattiua”

[viii] Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 1: L’Image-Mouvement (Paris, Les Editions de Minuit, 1983), 7; The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (London, MacGibbon & Kee, 1968), 390; Bronislava Nijinska, Early Memoirs, ed. and trans. Irina Nijinska and Jean Rawlinson (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1982), 466

[ix] Xenophon, Memorabilia, III, X, 1; Pliny the Elder, Natural History, XXXV, 79-90; and Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana, VoI, 19, ed. and trans. by J. J. Pollitt, in The Art of Greece (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall), 160-1, 168, 222.

[x] W. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 39. See also T. J. Clark. The Sight of Death: an Experiment in Art Writing. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

Because of the length of the whole essay I have uploaded it as a .pdf file Download 12. Green-1 A

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