POUSSIN, A CLASSICAL ARTIST IN A SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE

POUSSIN, A CLASSICAL ARTIST IN A SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLEAuthor(s): David CarrierSource: Source: Notes in the History of Art, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Summer 2009), pp. 40-46Published by: Ars Brevis Foundation, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23208583 .

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POUSSIN, A CLASSICAL ARTIST IN A SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE

Walking is the occasion of a great experi

ence of freedom. Freedom in thinking, free

dom in motion, a self-determination by the

individual. Is going for a walk an unsocial or an asocial act? Not at all.... As the amount

of walking in the world increases, there is

also a great critical spirit in the community. —Meyer Schapiro

Describing how older experiences survive in the mind, Freud recalls his visits to Italy:

Let us, by a night of imagination, suppose

that Rome is not a human habitation but a

psychical entity ... an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into

existence will have passed away and all the

earlier phases of development continue to

exist alongside the latest one.2

Just as ancient buildings are "still buried in the soil of the city or beneath modern build

ings," so in the mind "nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one." As Freud goes on to note, it is hard to repre sent "the characteristics of mental life ... in

pictorial terms," for we need to imagine now-vanished ancient buildings existing on the sites of modern churches.

Nicolas Poussin had a very different vi sion of Rome's history. His paintings often

depict that city, sometimes in deliberately anachronistic ways. At a certain point, "the

past.. . [is] revealed as inserted into, or part

David Carrier

of, the present."3 But contemporary Rome does not appear.

By 1600, Rome had . .. become a center of

the arts. But Baroque Rome was a capital

more narrowly religious and propagandistic

than its Renaissance predecessor. . . . Aban

doned as irrelevant, both for perceiving the

nature of the Roman Church and for under

standing its mission were the Renaissance

interests in Hebraic and Greco-Roman an

tiquity.4

Why would an artist who came from north ern France to work in Rome turn away from this very lively spectacle? From post-1624 to 1630, when Poussin "found himself... in those very circles in which the new full

baroque style was in the process of birth," he "takes a much more moderate and restrained

standpoint than hitherto, involving a new re

spect for 'High Renaissance' qualities."5 Our

goal is to understand this change. In his essay "Mourning and Melancholia,

Freud makes a fundamental distinction be tween two attitudes toward loss of loved ob

jects. In normal mourning, only when loss is

finally acknowledged can the libido attach itself to new objects. In melancholia, howev

er, with the ego identified with a lost object, the "object-loss" is "transformed into an

ego-loss."6 Then, in Freud's fine phrase, "the shadow of the object" falls "upon the ego." And so, "by taking flight into the ego love

escapes extinction."7 There is no reason to

diagnose Poussin as a melancholic. But just



41

he said, "Here you are sir, take it to your

seum and say: this is ancient Rome."12

as Freud s account of Leonardo helps us to understand that painter's curious inhibitions, an appeal to this analysis of melancholia can aid in the interpretation of Poussin's art. In his account of Rome, Freud imagines past and present coexisting. Poussin, rather, re

presses awareness of the present in favor of

antiquity. But what would be pathological melancholia in an analysand was, for the

painter, so I will argue, a healthy, productive process.

In art, Poussin resisted his contemporary society of the spectacle. Every morning, he walked

almost always on the Monte della Trinita...

from there the loveliest view unfolds of

Rome and its pleasant hills, which together

with the buildings form a stage set and the

ater. ... In the evening he would go out again

and stroll in the piazza at the foot of the hill, to mingle with the foreigners who customar

ily gather there.8

Compensating for growing political weak

ness, the papacy created "a new grand 'image' of Rome."9 Alexander VII wanted to

impress pilgrims, diplomats, and visiting Protestants.10 "The Catholic Church learned from the Reformation ... that the institution needed to project its image through a variety of media out into the world to all social

groups."11 But Poussin's art never shows this

image. "One day when I happened to be with him," Giovan Pietro Bellori tells,

visiting certain ruins of Rome with a foreign

er who was very keen to take some rare an

cient object back to his country, Nicolas said to him, "I would like to give you the most beautiful antiquity that you could desire," and reaching down with his hand he picked up a bit of earth and some pebbles. . . . Then

This past truly survives only when re-creat ed in art.

Rome s rulers devoted a great deal of ef fort and expense to making, viewing, and

maintaining spectacles.13 In speaking of these Baroque spectacles, I allude not just to the art in churches, but also to the way that Rome itself became visually tantalizing. Modern tourists know, for example, that the facades of Santa Maria dei Miracoli and Santa Maria in Montesanto were modified

by Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Carlo Fontana to provide a vista for travelers entering the

city from the north. That architectural trans formation remains visible; but we have few records of the lavish festivals, which fre

quently occupied public spaces. On Febru

ary 10, 1640, the birthday of the sister of Louis XIII was celebrated.

Christina saw her own son... play the part of

Love. . . . Her eleven-year-old daughter ar

rived later in the ballet in a ship.... The set

ting was of rocks backed by a distant seascape

and port, onto which sailed a ship with flags

fluttering] in the wind and with Cupid aiming his arrow perched on [the] poop.14

Present-day political life may help us imag ine these scenes, for our rulers also need such political spectacles. Today, too, "the flow of images carries everything before it."15 In some relevant ways, Poussin faced a similar situation.

Following a long tradition, which he re fused to acknowledge, Guy Debord de scribes walking in cities.

In a derive one or more persons during a cer

tain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their



42

work and leisure activities, and let them

selves be drawn by the attractions of the ter

rain and the encounters they find there.16

When you walk, you see a great many im

ages. A representation is a representation for

someone; but in our untruthful society, where the distinction between representation and viewer collapses, these images seem to be

contemplating themselves. We cannot feel at home in a world, Debord argues, where "the

spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image."17 In older cultures, "mass allegiance to frozen religious imagery was originally a shared acknowledgment of

loss, an imaginary compensation for a pover ty of real social activity."18 Now, by contrast, the spectacle "depicts what society can deliv erBut this wealth of pictures is not liberat

ing, for "no subjects ... are ever real actors in

history."19 Unlike Marx, Debord provides no respon

sible analysis of capitalism.20 And he never

offers "any kind of historical genealogy of the spectacle."21 But just as Schopenhauer's mythic commentary The World as Will and

Representation may suggest why life is con

flict-filled, so a city walk can inspire fasci nation with Debord's sketchy history:

Millenarianism, the expression of a revolu

tionary class struggle speaking the language

of religion for the last time, was already a modern revolutionary tendency, lacking

only the consciousness of being historical and nothing more.22

This, Debord argues, explains why these revolutions failed. He sketches an account of the seicento.

Baroque was the art of a world that had lost

its center with the demise of the last mythic order recognized by the Middle Ages. . . .

Theater and festival, or theatrical festival—

these were the essential moments of the

baroque.23

And he was fascinated by Piranesi and by two Claudes in the Louvre.24 "Piranesi is

psychogeography in the staircase. Claude Lorraine is psychogeography in his presen tation of a palatial quartier and the sea." De bord loved parts of old central Paris, which

disappeared during his lifetime.25 But about the present, he, like Poussin, was very pes simistic. "For the first time in history, it is

possible to govern without the slightest un

derstanding of art."26

Poussin s easel painting Cephalus and Auro ra (1631-1632; National Gallery, London)

(Fig. 1) shows Cephalus viewing a small

painting of his wife while struggling to dis

engage himself from the embrace of the

goddess Aurora.27 Pietro da Cortona's The

Triumph of Divine Providence and the Ful

fillment of Her Ends under the Papacy of Urban V7//(1642; Palazzo Barberini, Rome) (Fig. 2) is the 400-square-meter ceiling dec oration on the piano nobile of the reigning pope's grand palace.28 Providence is sur rounded by Purity, Justice, Mercy, Truth, and Beauty, while below Cronus devours his children. The elaborate panegyric to Urban VIII shows the virtues attributed to his rule. "The visually persuasive conceit tells us that

Urban, the poet-pope, chosen by Divine Providence and himself the voice of Divine

Providence, is worthy of immortality." A

very beautiful painting, this is a lie.

[Urban VIII s] leading characteristics were

extreme vanity and over-powering ambition

unaccompanied by any compensating strength of will. His rule is disfigured by acts of petty meanness and a complete fail



43

Fig. 1 Nicolas Poussin, Cephalus and Aurora. 1631-1632. Oil on canvas, 96.9 x 131.3 cm. National

Gallery, London. (Photo: © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY)



Fig. 2 Pietro da Cortona, The Triumph of Divine Providence and the Fulfillment of Her Ends under the Papacy of Urban VIII. 1642. Ceiling fresco. Palazzo Barberini,

Rome. (Photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY)



45

ure to achieve that aggrandizement of the

papacy which had been his original aim.29

By contrast, Poussin s Cephalus and Aurora

truthfully presents a myth to which we can

respond aesthetically. Art historians mostly do not moralize

about seventeenth-century painting.30 Nor do they compare Baroque public images with modern advertising.31 Many commen tators present Caravaggio as a protosocial protest painter. No one could legitimately

"Poussin, a Classical Artist in a Society of the Specta cle" is the title of Chapter 6 in my Poussin's Paintings: A Study in Art-Historical Methodology (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993). Here

I extend that analysis.

1. Meyer Schapiro, Worldview in Painting—Art and

Society: Selected Papers (New York: Braziller, 1999),

p. 148. See also Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A Histo

ry of Walking (New York: Viking, 2000). 2. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and

Alan Tyson. 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1957—

1974), XXI (1927-1931), pp. 70, 71.

3. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Prince ton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 224.

4. Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 331-332.

5. Denis Mahon, "Poussiniana: Afterthoughts Aris

ing from the Exhibition," Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6th

ser., 60 (July-Aug. 1962):61, 63.

6. Freud, XIV (1914-1916), p. 249.

7. Ibid., p. 257. 8. Giovan Pietro Bellori, The Lives of the Modern

Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. Alice Sedg wick Wohl (New York: Cambridge University Press,

2005), p. 322. 9. Richard Krautheimer, The Rome of Alexander

VII, 1655-1667 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 142. See also Rose Marie San Juan,

NOTES

view Poussin in such terms. But he did reject the dominant visual culture of his day.32 De bord had no developed theory of visual art. But just as a generation ago Tim Clark used

Society of the Spectacle to stage his enor

mously influential social history of Impres sionism, so now, when analysis of Poussin's art is too often cliched, scholars studying the

Baroque may find reading the Situationists

liberating.33

Rome: A City out of Print (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2001); Marcello Fagiolo, "L'Ar

chitettura della citta da Urbano VII a Clemente IX," in

Roma barocca: Bernini, Borromini, Pietro da Cor

tona, ed. Marcello Fagiolo and Paolo Portoghesi (Milan: Electa, 2006), pp. 322-329; and Mohammad

Ali Bhatti, "A Concept of an Illusion of Infinity in

Time and Space" (Ph.D. diss., Ohio University, 1998). 10. See my "Nicolas Poussin's Theater of the

World," Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 77, no. 3 (Sept. 2008): 162-171.

11. Evonne Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit

Baroque (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 115.

12. Bellori, p. 325

13. See Peter Burke, "Conspicuous Consumption in Seventeenth-Century Italy," in The Historical An

thropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Percep tion and Communication (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1987), ch. 10.

14. Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festi

vals, 1450-1650 (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1984), p. 3. See also his Splendor at Court:

Renaissance Spectacle and the Theater of Power

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973). 15. Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the

Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (New York: Verso,

1998), p. 27. 16. Guy Debord, "Theory of the Derive" (1958), in

Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans.

Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets,

1981), p. 50. See Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord:



46

Revolution in the Service of Poetry (Minneapolis: Uni

versity of Minnesota Press. 2006); Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1999); Andy Merri

field, Guy Debord (London: Reaktion Books, 2005); and Fredric Jameson, "Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity," in his The Cultural Turn: Selected

Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (New York:

Verso, 1998), ch. 6.

17. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone,

1994), p. 34. 18. Ibid., p. 20. 19. Jappe, pp. 36-37.

20. Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle (New York:

Routledge, 2003), for example, cites Debord but

makes no real appeal to the theory developed in The

Society of the Spectacle. 21. Jonathan Crary, "Spectacle, Attention, Counter

Memory," in Guy Debord and the Situationist Interna

tional: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough

(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), p. 456. Greil

Marcus's Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the

Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni

versity Press, 1989) is a poetic commentary. 22. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 102. 23. Ibid., pp. 133-134.

24. Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cam

bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 72-73, quotation

p. 75. See also Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography

(Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2006). 25. Debord's seicento hero was the cynical Cardi

nal de Retz; see J. H. M. Salmon, Cardinal de Retz: The Anatomy of a Conspirator (New York: Macmillan,

1970). 26. Debord, Comments, p. 52.

27. The terms of my analysis are borrowed from

Wollheim, pp. 107-108.

28. See Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in

Italy, 1600 to 1750, 3rd rev. ed. (Harmondsworth,

Eng.: Penguin, 1973), pp. 250-253, quotation p. 252; and Anna Lo Bianco, Pietro da Cortona's Ceiling, trans. Oona Smyth (Rome: Gebart, 2004).

29. Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the

Age of the Baroque, rev. and enl. [2nd] ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 40.

30. See, however, Frederick Hammond, Music and

Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Barberini Patronage under Urban VIII (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1994). 31. Dorothy Metzger Habel, The Urban Develop

ment of Rome in the Age of Alexander VII (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2002), compares Nazi to

Baroque visual propaganda. 32. See my "Nicolas Poussin's Landscape with a

Man Killed by a Snake," SOURCE: Notes in the His

tory of Art 28, no. 2 (Winter 2009):33-38, and T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith, "Why Art Can't

Kill the Situationist International," in Guy Debord and

the Situationist International, pp. 467-488.

33. I thank Malcolm Bull, Cathleen Chaffee, Arthur

Danto, Paul Foss, and Marianne Novy for comments.

