France
Poussin, Landscape with St. John Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with Saint John on Patmos, 1640, oil on canvas, 100.3 x 136.4 cm / 39-1/2 x 53-5/8 inches (Art Institute of Chicago)
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- In the middle of the seventeenth century
- Rome was reborn.
- It was a tremendous building camapign
- and I think about the extravagance spaces
- of the church of il Gesu
- with its extraordinary illusionistic ceiling.
- this was operatic, it was theatrical.
- It's hard to imagine how
- at a very same time
- there we have that broke theatricality
- we have the classicism, the repose, the peacefulness
- the rationalism of Poussin.
- We're in the Art Institute of Chicago.
- We're looking at Possin's landscape with Sant John on Patmos.
- This is a painting that really is about
- classical order and measured reality.
- We know this is Saint John because of the eagle that stands beside him,
- which is a traditional symbol of this Evangelist.
- We're looking at Saint John
- sitting in the foreground writing the book of Revelation,
- writing about the end of time, the second comming of Christ
- are really violent moments,
- but within this incredibly serene and peaceful landscape.
- And of course it's Pussain who has been credited
- with inventing the ideal landscape and
- that's exactly what we have here.
- And it's going to be very important for art history,
- for actually centuries to come.
- Artists will look back at the classical landscape
- and reinterprete it.
- In fact Pussin style was so infuential
- that it became a standard for the French Academy.
- And those who painted landscapes in this way,
- with a sense of rigor and order and rationalism,
- in a kind of ideal landscape,
- became known as poussinists.
- So what has he actually done here?
- He's placed the main figure in the foreground but he's really quite small
- in relationship to the landscape. He sits in a very classicised pose.
- In fact we think that Poussin took this pose directly
- from representations of river gods from ancient Rome.
- And of course Poussin, although he was French,
- was in Rome for most of his life.
- And that figure, Saint John, is enromanited in the foreground.
- He's surrounded by the ruines of classical antiquity.
- We see ruines to his left and to his right.
- And also in the background, where we see the ruins
- of a classical temple and an ancient obelisk.
- So he's in this landscape that has a sense of the passage of time
- as he's writing his book about the end of time.
- The notion of passage, I think, is important to understanding
- the way Pussin constructs a landscape.
- Saint John is placed in the very foreground,
- right at the bottom of the painting,
- but we can't raise back to the middle ground
- where that temple is that you had mentioned.
- Instead, we have a couple of visual paths.
- We may try to go down and straight back, but
- we see water, not once but twice.
- And also a curtain of trees.
- And so that way seems too difficult. So instead,
- our eye meanders over to the right
- and we see a road that seems to go back,
- but it draws our eyes slowly through this landscape
- so that we slow down
- and enjoy the space that he's created.
- And at each point in this landscape
- he gives us something to look at, the foreground
- with Saint John and the ruins, that path way
- punctuated by trees, into the middle ground
- with that temple and obelisk and then again into the background
- with the mountains and furter back with the area perspective and
- more mountains and clouds. At each place
- our eye has a place to rest in the landscape.
- The lanscape is not a specific place.
- This is very much a collage of ideal forms and it makes sens
- for an artist whose aesthetic has been shaped by Rome,
- which itself is layers of cultures.
- Look for instance at this painting where
- you've got the classical Greek or Roman temple
- but it's next to an Egyptian obelisk.
- We actually see references to two cultures,
- both of which had ruled but had both fallen.
- The idea here by showing those ruins is to show that
- there is a new Christian order that will be eternal,
- foretold by Saint John's book of Revelation.
- The landscape is carefully, rigorously composed.
- Everything has a sens of order and structure and geometry.
- But that is so counter to what we expect or
- what we think about Saint John writing the Apocalypse.
- This is a widely violent vision, it is the end of time.
- It's an important reminder that this artist was
- actually studying stoic philosophy from ancient Greece,
- this idea that the control of emotion was of the utmost importance.
- And not just Poussin but the circle of painters that he found in Rome.
- We need to remember that there was more going on in Rome.
- Then the pope's commisioning these theatrical works of art
- in the churchers of counterreformation.
- Poussin found a circle of painters, many of whom were
- interested in stoic philosophy, and that he painted canvases like this one.
- So Poussin has accomplished what seems to be nearly impossible.
- He's created poetry out of the rational, out of the ideal.
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At 5:31, how is the moon large enough to block the sun? Isn't the sun way larger?
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