A Classicist Who Burned with Inner Fire

By ROBERT HUGHES

Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) was the greatest French artist of the 17th century, the founder of his country's classical school. With him, French painting shook off its provinciality and became a European affair, mirroring the power of its grand siecle, the age of Louis XIV. After Poussin, Rome could no longer condescend to Paris. But without Rome there would have been no Poussin: Rome formed and trained him, gave him his conception of professional life, his myths, his essential subjects, his sensuality and measure -- in short, his pictorial ethos.

He first went there in 1624 and stayed 16 years. What did he see? What did he do? Amazingly enough, no U.S. museum until now has tried to tell us: there has never been a Poussin retrospective in this country, even though some of his greatest works are in American collections. But now the gap has been filled. Through Nov. 27, "Poussin: the Early Years in Rome," containing 36 paintings and 58 drawings by the master, is on view at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. The show comes with a detailed, argumentative and altogether excellent catalog by the art historian Konrad Oberhuber, who has carried Poussin studies well beyond the point at which they were left at the death of Anthony Blunt. It will not travel to any other museums. And it is a wonderful show, bound to correct whatever stereotypes one may have about Poussin the cold, the correct, the theoretician of mode and decorum.

To the 17th century the classical world was the locus of ideal beauty, but how did a Frenchman enter it? A writer could read Vergil without leaving Paris, but a painter had to go to Rome. There, ancient sculpture and architecture abounded; from them, antiquity could be reimagined. It was the strength of the reimagining, not just its archaeological correctness, that counted. Poussin's main regular job during his Roman years was drawing records of ancient sculpture for a rich antiquary and scholar named Cassiano dal Pozzo. This gave him excellent access to collections, and the time to develop the repertoire of figures that would fill his work in years to come. Rome was not just a boneyard of suggestive antiques; it was full of living art whose plasticity, color and narrative richness surpassed anything he could see in France -- Caravaggio, Pietro da Cortona, the Carracci. But Pozzo's main gift to Poussin was the intellectual background that enabled a melancholy, impetuous young Frenchman to become the chief peintre-philosophe of his age.

"This young man has the inner fire of a devil," wrote one of Poussin's Roman acquaintances. Indeed, Poussin's vitality in reconceiving the antique is the clue to his art. His renderings of classical myths struck back to the root. Poussin was more of a sensualist than people think. You want to roll on his grass, sprawl under the shot-silk blue and honey-colored sky that unfurls over his Roman campagna. His goddesses and nymphs grow up out of the earth; they have not dropped from Olympus. They carry their archaism like a bloom. There is more sexual tension between the white goddess and the kneeling shepherd in Diana and Endymion, 1628, than in a hundred Renoirs. This, for Poussin, is part of classicism. "The beautiful girls you will have seen at Nimes," he wrote to a friend in 1642, "will not, I am certain, delight your spirits less than the sight of the beautiful columns of the Maison Carree, since the latter are only ancient copies of the former."

But antiquity mattered to him for other reasons. It was law. Deprived of its influence, a painter could go off the rails and become a fribbling hack, a "strappazone," he wrote in Paris, "like all the others who are here." Its modes, proportions and sense of decorum -- which Poussin understood not as a mere formula for elegance but as the basis for appropriate treatment of all subjects, from a battle piece to a pastorale -- had to be matched. But since no ancient paintings beyond a few grotesques and crumbling patches of fresco survived, matching entailed the most strenuous invention. And so for Poussin, the one thing that truly sustained creation was the inseminating authority of the past.

Poussin was to art what his contemporary Pierre Corneille became to drama. As La Bruyere said of Corneille, he "paints men as they ought to be." The world of Corneille's great tragedies of the 1640s, such as Rodogune or Horace, is prefigured in Poussin: not just the reflection of classical drama, but its heightening into a schematic grandeur where will, pride and logic are displayed as they rarely are in real life, and exemplary self-sacrifice resolves the conflict between duty and passion.

The manifesto of this in Poussin's early work is The Death of Germanicus, 1627. Germanicus Julius Caesar, conqueror of Germany, was sent to command Rome's eastern provinces and died in Antioch in A.D. 19, poisoned -- so it was believed -- by a jealous Roman governor. He soon became an archetype of the betrayed hero.

Poussin turns this incident into a tremendous oration on duty and continuity, overlaid with Christian allusions to the entombment of Jesus, whose life Germanicus' overlapped. The hero lies dying beneath the frame of a blue curtain, which suggests both a temple pediment and a military tent. On the right are his wife, women servants and little sons; on the left, his soldiers and officers. The common soldier on the far left weeps inarticulately, his grandly modeled back turned toward us. Next to him, a centurion in a billowing red cloak starts forward: grief galvanized to action in the present. Then a gold-armored pillar of a general in a blue cloak (adapted from an antique bas-relief) projects grief forward into the future by swearing an oath of revenge; Poussin hides the man's face to suggest that this is not a personal matter but one of history itself.

The target of this socially ascending wave of resolution is not only Germanicus (whose exhausted head on the pillow vividly predicts the style of Gericault nearly 200 years later) but also his little son, whose blue cloak matches the general's; the women suffer, but the boy learns, remembers and will act. The more Germanicus unfolds, the more one realizes why Bernini, on his visit to Louis XIV in Paris, declared Poussin to be the only French artist who really mattered: un grande favoleggiatore, "a great storyteller."

Later in life Poussin would complain of the pressure of commissions. "Monsieur, these are not things that can be done at the crack of a whip," he wrote to his friend and patron Chantelou in 1645, "like your Parisian painters who make a sport of turning out a picture in twenty-four hours." But in his Roman youth, he could and did turn them out, and it would be idle to pretend that all early Poussin is on the same level. Some paintings are much less "finished" than others. A few are hackwork (such as Hannibal Crossing the Alps, done for Pozzo, who had a thing about elephants). And one painting from San Francisco's De Young Museum, The Adoration of the Golden Calf, does not survive comparison; it is clearly not by Poussin at all, though it shows how fanatically others imitated him. But the unevenness is part of Poussin's development: an artist in the real world, discovering the true tone of his ideas. Young Poussin did not paint plaster gods, and he was not one himself.