The Brooklyn Rail

I came to Nicolas Poussin indirectly—through Paul Cézanne. I understood that Cézanne admired Poussin and that made me look. From there it seemed Poussin represented Cézanne’s imperative to “render nature with the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone.” Despite there being no geometric imagery in Poussin, when I came upon his paintings I saw them as geometric. In retrospect, I realized it was his disciplined ordering of pictorial form that I took (or mistook) to be a geometric premise.

There is little that feels haphazard in Poussin’s paintings—parts to wholes, figures to landscapes and buildings, his figures’ emotional expressions to their gestures—all inhere within the total composition. Minus the symbolism and emotional drama, Poussin’s painterly structures are as refined and dynamic as Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43)—at least from this abstract painter's point of view.

We can pursue the analogy of formal structure between Poussin and Mondrian further. Mondrian’s energetically ordered geometric units are easily apparent, but what would be equivalent in the case of Poussin? My intuition of Poussin’s rigorous pictorial organization was confirmed with the discovery of a text that lays out the formal coordinates for Poussin as clearly as De Stijl did for Mondrian. In my research for a book to be published in spring, I became fascinated with Leonardo da Vinci’s A Treatise on Painting. The treatise was only edited and published from da Vinci’s fragmentary notes over a century after he died. Poussin was involved in the project, even providing figure drawings for illustrations.

As well as the close connection between Poussin’s rendering of figures and da Vinci’s writing, the landscape elements of Poussin correspond to da Vinci’s theories of perspective. Da Vinci developed three systems of perspective for painting: linear, related to Leon Battista Alberti and Piero della Francesca’s studies; aerial, as in the effects of air and weather on color and form; and acuity, perspective that focuses on the physiological limits of seeing objects and colors at distances. A look at Poussin's landscapes reveals these theories in motion. His landscapes are accurate but do not feel quite natural—they feel more constructed than observed.

While Mondrian was a key theorist of De Stijl, Poussin’s great originality lay in the creative application of da Vinci’s complex of ideas—applied, it can be argued, more completely than in da Vinci’s own paintings. It is relevant that Cézanne, despite his commitment to direct observation, also believed in Poussin’s sense of synthetic ordering in painting. The more I’ve contemplated Poussin’s pictorial structures, the more I’ve appreciated them as what might be called the “second nature” of painting. I think this is what Mondrian’s pure plastic emotion is about. Poussin mediated on biblical and classical histories to develop it within the tradition of painting inherited from the Italian Renaissance. His working of tradition made it a historical medium available to Cézanne and, in turn, to Mondrian. For me, Poussin enacts a brilliantly creative performance within tradition. This tradition, as Poussin developed it, is eloquent and capacious enough to provide foundations for subsequent generations. I can admire the narrative dimensions of his work, but it’s his painterly plastic structures that I love.