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In these late pictures Poussin's style achieves an exalted na?veté. The boldness of the vegetation in Spring suggests the plainspoken power of early Renaissance painting in Siena, or maybe even the jungle fantasies of Le Douanier Rousseau. And the monumental immobility of the figures in The Infant Bacchus and a number of other late paintings brings to mind the ritualistic antinaturalism of the sculpture of Old Kingdom Egypt. Here we discover a final paradox of artistic mastery: the shedding of facility that can be achieved only by an artist who knows everything there is to know about his craft.
It is significant, I believe, that the exhibition is called "Poussin and Nature" rather than "Poussin and Landscape," for Rosenberg and Christiansen obviously see in Poussin's studies of men and women living in the natural world the jumping-off point for a more general consideration of the place of nature in the work of this artist who was in many respects the ultimate conceptualist. Their goal, as I understand it, is to complicate our sense of Poussin's classicism by emphasizing the role of spontaneity, intuition, and poetic perception in his processes. Some might be inclined to argue that by emphasizing Poussin's nature poetry, Rosenberg and Christiansen have given us a more viewer-friendly master--Poussin lite. And of course there is an element of seduction in these pictures that you will not find in some of Poussin's more densely packed figure paintings, whether the two versions of the Rape of the Sabine Women or the cycles of Sacraments. But my guess is that many people who take a long, hard look at "Poussin and Nature" are going to find themselves revisiting other aspects of the painter's work with fresh eyes, for there is always a poetic spark in Poussin that undercuts the complacency that is often associated with classicism. For Poussin, the drive to absorb the visual languages of Greece and Rome and the High Renaissance was only the beginning. The ultimate question was what you wanted to say, and even his steeliest set pieces are suffused with a speculative spirit.
