POUSSIN'S CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS: SELF AND OTHER IN THE SELF-PORTRAITS OF POUSSIN AND MATISSE

POUSSIN'S CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS: SELF AND OTHER IN THE SELF-PORTRAITS OF POUSSINAND MATISSEAuthor(s): David CarrierSource: Source: Notes in the History of Art, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Spring 1996), pp. 28-35Published by: Ars Brevis Foundation, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23205590 .

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POUSSIN S CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS:

SELF AND OTHER IN THE SELF-PORTRAITS OF POUSSIN AND MATISSE

David Carrier

In his Louvre Self-Portrait, we see Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) standing before an in

scription identifying the location and date, Rome in 1650, of this picture. Various

paintings are behind him; a woman is repre sented on the work to his right. Modern

scholarship, following his commentator

Bellori, has identified this allegorical figure as an image of friendship, an appropriate symbol in a portrait made for a patron.' Perhaps, alternatively, it is a Poussin show

ing the Visitation.2 In any case, the figure she is embracing is off the picture's edge, an odd cropping found nowhere else in Poussin's paintings. This positively Matis sean image of a self-sufficient painter an

ticipates a modernist ideal as yet rare in the seventeenth century. Our artists aspire to control the distribution and organize the re

ception of their work, but in Poussin's

Rome, painters usually worked closely with their patrons. Poussin, the odd man out, took control of his own work, as here he looks out to the Parisian patron, Paul Fréart de Chantelou, who commissioned this work —and also to us, now that this painting is in a public space, the Louvre.

As in his landscapes, Poussin creates an

order based upon verticals and horizontals,

using almost Mondrianesque frames. He ap pears in control, but look behind him at the

strange un-Cartesian lack of lucidity. Where

exactly are these canvases? Reading this pic ture anachronistically as an image of mod

ern Poussin studies, contrast the small area

containing the much-discussed allegorical figure with the various vast empty areas. To focus merely on the iconographic puzzle ne

glects the larger setting behind the artist. The intense concentration required to

paint one's face with the aid of a mirror is reflected" in the painting.3 Poussin, hiding his left hand, holds with his right hand a book. In the Berlin Self-Portrait (Fig. 1), made the previous year for another devoted

patron, Jean Pointel, Poussin poses in a similar way, holds a book in his right hand, and in his left hand has a stylus. He was

(this can be deduced from the drawings) right-handed, and since he holds the writing instrument in his left hand, he is using a mirror.4 Comparing the two pictures, which were not intended to be seen together, makes it easier to infer that in the Louvre

portrait he also used a mirror. But consider

ing how self-portraits were made makes it

easy to deduce the mirror's presence. The relative merits of the two pictures was a delicate issue for Poussin; Chantelou was a

touchy patron. The Louvre picture is in one

way more subtle, calling upon us to infer the mirror's existence by noting that Pous sin's painting hand is hidden.

Looking into a mirror, we see ourselves;

viewing an artist depicted looking into a

mirror, we fictionally see ourselves in his

picture, as if we had become him. This act is akin to Descartes's procedure:



NICOLAVS POVfSIHVS ANDtlYEUSIS ACAUEMICVi f.01 V" I.. S fRIMVS

pir.TOR. OSDÍNARÍVS L.VC0VIC1 IVSTI REGIS GAl-U/E.. AWNO tW.

I ¿49- . /ETA1 ÍS SV/E. SS

Fig. 1 Nicolas Poussin, Self-Portrait. Staatliche Museen, Berlin



30

After having examined all things with

care, I must finally conclude and main

tain that this proposition: I am, I exist, is necessarily true every time that I pro nounce it or conceive it in my mind.

To grasp this argument, it is not enough to

glance at these words; only saying the

words I am, 1 exist makes the assertion true.

Just as in his Meditations of First Philoso

phy (1642), Descartes, speaking in the first

person, asks that we, his readers, identify with him as he doubts, reflects, and comes

to know himself; so when we see Poussin, we become identified with him. Descartes's

Meditations are deliberately impersonal.

Anyone, male or female, old or young, can

perform the same reasoning process. The

ungendered Cartesian self antedates the con

cerns of postmodernist multiculturalism.

Descartes centers the world on the individ

ual reader; as in Self-Portrait, Poussin cen

ters his picture on the viewer become him.

Most commentators focus on how Pous

sin appears far away from the viewer, citing even his toga as evidence.61 emphasize how

the spectator can identify with the artist; but there is here no real disagreement—only difference of emphasis. Nothing in the pic ture tells us which way to see it; when we

move from seeing the artist to seeing our

selves as the artist, no detail in the picture has changed. And, yet, something changes.

Seeing a picture made by using a mirror, we may focus either on who is represented in the mirror or on how we identify with the

person depicted, as if we were looking into

a mirror. While both ways of thinking are

consistent with the facts, they have very dif

ferent implications. If I imagine seeing Poussin in Self-Portrait, then I imagine

looking into his studio in Rome in 1650. If

I imagine being Poussin seeing himself in

the mirror, then I imagine being in his stu dio in Rome in 1650.

Can I imagine myself a fifty-six-year-old Frenchman living in Rome? Seeing myself as Poussin, I cast a strange, unforgiving re

gard, elegant but hardly handsome, upon the person standing before his painting. Dignified, I am far in space and time from

my present self. The man I see myself imagining becoming is in Rome in 1650. Even as I identify with him as he is pressing forward, I know that I remain far away, seeing the painting in Paris in the 1990s. Is it grandiose thinking, imagining oneself

Poussin? Setting oneself in the artist's mind

is a familiar traditional interpretative pro cedure. Mostly the commentators seem to

resist imagining seeing themselves as

Poussin. But, it is arguable, only that read

ing accepts completely the illusionism of

such an image. If I see Poussin in his pic ture and I see that he is looking into a mir

ror, then what follows logically is that I

must be seeing myself. But a viewer need

not be logical in this way. Parmigianino s Selj-l'ortrait in a Convex

Mirror (Fig. 2) shows him in a mirror held

at arm's length, his hand enlarged at the

bottom, making us momentarily take the

painter's identity.7 His pose is similar to

Poussin's, facing us with eyes turned

slightly aside and head tilted, a natural po sition for a man painting himself looking in

a mirror. With the right hand extended for

ward, Parmigianino shows his own studio, its window at the upper left. Once we see

his hand, the game is given away. No doubt

such employment of a mirror implies nar

cissism.8 But it may also involve trying to

see, objectively, how one appears to others.

Making his mirror harder to detect, increas

ing the difficulty of our identification with

him, Poussin, by comparison, heightens the



31

Fig. 2 Parmigianino, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

ambiguity. He avoids Parmigianino s ous display of virtuosity.

I admire the economy of these pictures, which thus extend within-the-frame illusion ism to include the space in front of the

painting. As a philosopher, I am fascinated with imagining identifying with—and, thus,

momentarily becoming—Parmigianino or Poussin.

Henri Matisse frequently depicted mir rors showing himself at work in his studio.

Many drawings and paintings of himself

depicting his model—Artist and Model Re

flected in a Mirror (Fig. 3), for example—



Fig. 3 Henri Matisse, Artist and Model Reflected in a Mirror. Baltimore Museum of

Art, the Cone Collection



33

use mirrors to close off that space. In his most dramatic studio pictures, we are

caught in the infinite regress, seeing him make the picture we are viewing. Reclining Nude in the Studio (1935) shows the model

sprawling close to us and, in the lower

right-hand corner, an image of the artist's

right hand making the drawing we see.9

Holding the drawing, our right hand is close to the representation of the artist's. We then

imaginatively become the person making the artwork, seeing the model as we see what illusionistically becomes our hand

drawing her. Although this drawing depicts only a part of one hand of Matisse, it might thus be entitled Self-Portrait with Model.

Poussin, in his Self-Portrait, looks out ward. A proper gentleman, an intellectual

retaking his familial social role, he is not

engaged in the ignoble manual labor of

picture making. He uses the mirror to show the strange space behind him. Matisse, so

fiercely protective of his personal privacy, in Reclining Nude in the Studio takes us into the creative process. Very close to the

model, we are even closer to the drawing within-the-drawing of her. Matisse presents himself hard at work. He uses the mirror to close off his picture space. When we iden

tify with Poussin, we find ourselves in a

faraway place. When we imaginatively be come Matisse, we are caught up in that pre sent moment when he makes the drawing, in a studio with no place for anyone but artist and model.

Comparing the self-portraits of Poussin and Matisse, the ways they present them selves and use mirrors sum up many broad er differences in their art. The expressive gestures of Poussin's figures are intended, he wrote to Chantelou, "to arouse the soul" to appropriate emotions.10 Painting for him is an exercise in visual rhetoric; the sober

pose of the woman in the painting in Self

Portrait and of Poussin himself, as much as

joyous dancers in a bacchanal, produce a calculated effect. Expression, Matisse said, "does not reside in passions glowing in a human face or manifested by violent move ment."11 His goal was not to move the spec tator, but to provide "a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a

good armchair." In such aesthetic experi ence, concerned with the here and now for its own sake, "art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and

simply for those moments' sake."1 His words identify Poussin's place in

space and time. Far away from his loyal friends, he remained (as he wrote to Chante

lou) emotionally close at hand. But even as Poussin asks us to imagine becoming him, word and image work at cross purposes. He

appears to be close; but today, when his

subjects have become bookish, much more so than in 1650, the words, which func tioned as a reminder of his temporal prox imity to Chantelou, now tell us how far

away he was. Matisse, avoiding words, per mits us to imagine his scenes set still in the here and now.

Matisse, so often criticized for being an

escapist, escapes to his Arcadia, a place and time outside the world of everyday life and its struggles, his own studio when he is

engrossed in the act of making art. Pous sin's subjects are always presented as being far away: far away temporally in his history paintings; far away in space when Self Portrait presents him to Chantelou. Ma tisse's studio scenes, by contrast, are set in the immediate presence of his viewers. Pous

sin, looking backward historically, finds time

menacing. The shadow he himself casts on the words in Self-Portrait allude to tran

sience, like the famous shadow in his Ar cadian Shepherds, where figures living in



34

that ideal land acknowledge that even there death exists. In Nice in 1935, in an instant, Matisse will have lifted his hand and con tinued to make the drawing. But the aes thetic illusion is that this moment of change can never come.

Poussin, the philosopher-painter, stern, seemingly ambivalent about the pleasures provided by painting, depicts serious sub

jects. The Self-Portraits are his only paint ings showing contemporary themes. Ma tisse is, by contrast, an essentially sensuous

painter. His works rarely employ difficult

iconography; his subjects mostly come from his immediate everyday life. And, yet, his studio self-portraits also make a philo sophical comment about the nature of the self. Unlike the Impressionists, who regis tered fleeting impressions, he was willing, he said, "to risk losing charm in order to obtain greater stability."13 In his self-por traits with model, he achieves stability by

This essay is for Philip Winsor, with gratitude for

his support as editor of my books at Pennsylvania State University Press. I owe to Tony Green the

suggestion of the importance of analogy between

Poussin's painting and Descartes's Meditations.

1. This essay extends the argument of my Pous

sin's Paintings: A Study in Art-Historical Method

ology (University Park: 1993), pp. 1-26, which summarizes the literature; see also Marc Fumaroli, L 'école du silence: Le sentiment des images au

XVIIe siécle (Paris: 1994), pp. 43—47, and Pierre Rosenberg, Nicolas Poussin: 1594-1665, exh. cat.

(Paris: 1994), pp. 425—430. 2. Milovan Stanic, Poussin: beauté de l'énigme

(Paris: 1994), pp. 95-100. 3. Christopher Wright, Poussin Paintings: A

Catalogue Raisonné (London: 1985), p. 109.

NOTES

bnnging the spectator into the picture. Be

coming Matisse, if we imaginatively iden

tify with the figure in his mirror or set our hand next to his in Reclining Nude in the

Studio, we are taken out of ourselves, out of our world of change, into his studio.

Classical Cartesian epistemology asks: How do inner representations match the ex ternal world? Might nothing in the world

correspond to our representations? Matisse, confident that the external world exists, is concerned with a closely related question: the relation of the artist to his representa tions. Aiming to identify the "essential char acter" of his subject, he believes that when he departs "from nature," that is "only to in

terpret her more fully."14 For Matisse, paint ing is a natural activity—as natural as eve

ryday perception—the value and validity of whose products are grounded in the nature of perception.15

4. In the various engravings after these paintings, the words are reversed but not the hands.

5. René Descartes, Meditations of First Philoso

phy, trans. L. J. Lafleur (New York: 1951), p. 24.

6. See Oskar Batschmann, Nicolas Poussin: Dia

lectics of Painting, trans. M. Daniel (London: 1990),

p. 51. 7. See my Principles of Art History Writing

(University Park: 1991), pp. 160-162. 8. On Parmigianino's narcissism, see Laurie

Schneider Adams, Art and Psychoanalysis (New York: 1993), pp. 265-266.

9. See the reproduction in John Elderfield, The

Drawings of Henri Matisse (New York: 1984), p. 194.

10. See Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the

Passions (New Haven and London: 1994), pp. 12

13, in which she discusses this, his most famous



35

statement about art theory. 11. Henri Matisse, "Notes of a Painter," in Ma

tisse on Art, trans. J. Flam (New York: 1978), pp.

36, 38. 12. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art

and Poetry (1868), ed. D. Hill (Berkeley: 1980), p. 190.

13. Matisse, p. 37.

14. Ibid., pp. 37, 39. 15. This essay develops ideas presented in my

"Matisse's Shchukin Triptych and Leo Steinberg's 'The Philosophical Brothel,'" Word & Image 10, no. 2 (Apr-June 1994): 119-137; and in my forth

coming "Henri Matisse, Philosopher-Painter."



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POUSSIN'S CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS: SELF AND OTHER IN THE SELF-PORTRAITS OF POUSSIN AND MATISSE