Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Nicolas Poussin
French; 17th-century
New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art
92%
The Abduction of the Sabine Women. 1633-34. Oil on canvas
This painting is Poussin in a word: strict classical architecture hemming in a paroxysm of human activity that is, itself, composed of figures just as rigid, just as modeled, as the buildings bounding their movements. Poussin admits chaos into his work only as the remainder of absolute precision. It exists here as the unaccountable spaces between weapons and limbs; it's present especially in that oblong patch of empty ground cutting diagonally across the image from baby up to horse. But even at its most violent, everything in this picture is so controlled. Look at the figure group closest to the picture plane at right, a scalene pyramid whose peak is the dagger held up by that gold-shirted buff guy. A mass of flesh and fabric, the group pushes left against the image's opposite thrust, casting an invisible line up towards red-robed Romulus, who extends his arm out above the scene to set off the picture's pulse rightwards. Often, I get the feeling that what's good in Poussin is all the stuff he doesn't have control over, namely, the odd blocks of space and tonal shifts that exist just outside of his perfectly sculptured forms — the bits of unreality that the painting of perfect reality has to admit. In this rare painting, however, he has brought those things under total governance. (TFS, 2026)
Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Institute of Art
74%
The Death of Germanicus. 1627. Oil on canvas
Poussin's busy figure groups are sometimes capable of establishing a sort of sly or even unconscious organization that works against the chaos they predominantly offer up to vision. Not so in this painting, which is a skein of immaculate poses. (It should be noted that the geometry in the architecture up above does seem to be trying to impose order onto the scene below). This painting is by no means bad, but its quality works against its intentions. Namely, the high achievement of Poussin's modeling, and the precision with which he's rendered space, result not in verisimilitude but in a bizarre cut-and-paste appearance to every figure (which is sort of this artist's trademark). You could just about peel the woman at far right off of the canvas and place her somewhere else in the composition, and with little detriment to the picture overall. It's a pretty amazing visual effect, almost like the limning of old American painting (Copley comes to mind). Poussin is certainly better whenever his pictures manage, against their own logic and his technique, to work themselves up into systems, but there's something to be said for the too-perfect qualities of this painting, and for the weird unreality it produces. (TFS, 2025)