The Brooklyn Rail

I am standing in front of Nicolas Poussin’s Eucharist (ca. 1637–40), a painting of The Last Supper in Room 29 at the National Gallery in London. I have never seen it before; it says recent acquisitions on the label next to it. It’s a very different picture. Not your usual Poussin master class of colorful floating figures and storytelling. Ironically it’s perhaps the most Caravaggio-like painting he ever made. I say ironically because Poussin painted like Caravaggio and Guido Reni had never happened just a few years before him. None of those theatrical close ups of figures and their pathos. No, he was not interested in it, he was after something else. He was about creating a larger picture, a dream-like history lesson where you as a viewer can enter and be. A vignette of the past made so real, it is the present.

In the Eucharist, Christ is in the center of a large somber stone room. His pensive head is downturned, and its sharp angles make it look like a painting of a sculpture of a Greek bust. In the foreground we are faced with two Roman tricliniums, the likes of which will inspire Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 Barcelona Pavilion daybeds. There are two reclined figures on either side of the large banquet. All of their gazes are directed towards Christ, who holds the grail in a toast-like gesture. The air is thick with tension. Judas’s head is in Christs’s lap, like a bad dog asking for forgiveness. There is a surprising figure in the doorway in the left corner. Light passes through him, illuminating the back wall of the temple. We can’t see his face, just his back, suggesting imminent danger. He is a watcher guarding this underground event, sanctioned by the very authorities Poussin is choosing to represent in the somber remnants of a Roman temple. The scene reads like a Peter Greenaway film still. The candlelight from above casts light on the apostles. Poussin then also boldly placed a single candle on a wooden stool in the foreground like he needed another light source, a mini lighthouse. This candle becomes a player, a protagonist offering hope. The game of shadows that the candle casts on the participants’ worried faces, the half-eaten food sitting on silver platers, and the furniture they are lounging on makes the whole scene possible. It’s pure magic in muted tones. But that is what Poussin does. He sets up a mood for you, the viewer, to enter. It’s a slow release and you are hooked.

On the other side of the same room there is a painting I always liked, Landscape with Travelers Resting (ca. 1638–9). It’s a lighter affair. A modern and mysterious picture recalling the tempests of Giorgione and El Greco, and the bathers of Caspar David Friedrich and Paul Cézanne, which came later. The landscape these figures inhabit is like most of Poussin landscapes, full of possibilities. But they are not mere travelers; they are one of many pilgrims flocking to Rome to visit the holy city. They need to move quickly and reach Aurelian walls. The immediate countryside outside the walls was infested with malaria and brigands. One of the pilgrims in the background with a walking stick and blue drapery floating in the wind looks like they just came out of a Balthus painting. Careless and easy.

Poussin lived and worked in a city resembling a construction site on a monumental scale. Busy and noisy Rome was going yet through another change. A profound change that Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur called a baroque hurricane.

The medieval and antique Rome was dying in front of his eyes and the new Rome of the extravagant fountains and opulent palaces that we see today was being born. One can’t help but think about what kind of impact this had on Poussin and his love of all things old, and how this affected his stories and urgency to tell them. A lament for vanishing Roman temples that for thousand years of medievo got repurposed and inhabited by Orsinis, Colonnas and other powerful Roman families were suddenly gone to make way for new possibilities. I bet he hated it. Yet his collectors and supporters were the ones building the new splendor that needed so much content.

Nessuno é profeta in patria

Nobody is a prophet in their homeland, the Italian proverb goes. Prophet or not, Poussin had to leave France to be the other, in order to become himself. He arrived in Rome with a bag full of wonder an ultimate story teller that happened to be a great painter. A voice from the past.