Poussin and the Poetics of Painting

Abstract

This 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. The poet's ideas on artistic imitation, novelty, and plot structure and unity, which are exemplified in his epic La Gerusalemme liberata, proved to be fundamental to the artist's conception of narrative painting, culminating in the Israelites Gathering Manna. In the paintings after the Gerusalemme, Poussin does not merely illustrate Tasso's verse, but cultivates pictorial means to refashion the poet's metaphors of desire. The interplay of poetic and painterly imagery also animates Poussin's Ovidian masterpieces, the Echo and Narcissus and the Realm of Flora. 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.

Poussin, Gombauld, and the Creation of Diana and Endymion

“…Unglaub pointed out that Lee relied too heavily on prior iconographic formulae, and focused instead on the way Poussin alluded to texts through pictorial similes and analogies, mythological imbrication, and other intertextual means. 66 Poussin's refashioning of Gombauld's metaphor of Night furling her sails in his own image of Nox pulling aside the curtain of night would have required a process of mediation. In translating this verbal image into a visual one consistent with his landscape setting the artist had to alter the trope somewhat: the dark curtain of night (one curtain only) replaces the plural sails, and is attached to a high tree limb as Nox reaches to move it.…”

“…His act of speaking has an important intertextual function in reaching back to the original verbal medium of Poussin's literary sources and in leading the viewer towards the possibility of recovering ways in which the artist projected the narrative forward into the visual medium. 86 The viewer thus attempts to fold back the iconicity of the pictorial medium into visual narration. The 'address' of Endymion is the essential message that the viewer is under pressure to decipher, for in his 'overdetermined' state, as Marin would say, the shepherd bears the greatest burden in communicating the story.…”

“…Recent research has shown that, as Poussin laboured to bring a novel approach to his mythologies, he consulted a wide variety of classical and modern visual and textual sources. 8 His unprecedented concetto in his Diana and Endymion is no exception. Poussin's use of Gombauld is thus quite revealing of his complex artistic process, in which he borrows ideas from previous texts and images and adapts them to his own artistic and expressive purposes.…”

Resurrecting Oedipus: Poussin’s Birth of Bacchus.

“…The discourse around Poussin’s Ovidian canvases has historically neglected the narrative substance of the myths they depict, reducing them, as Unglaub (2006) observes, to tropes. Instead, attention has centered on textual sources—which, in the case of Birth of Bacchus , were controversial from the start.…”