Galileo's confirmation of Copernican cosmology was one of the major cultural problems of seventeenth-century Europe. Which was right? The reasoned experiments of science, or the faith of the Roman Catholic Church, which condemned such cosmology as contrary to Holy Writ? Nicolas Poussin, the classical French painter in Rome, offered his personal solution to this dilemma in his final paintings, mainly landscapes, usually mythological, but always allegorical. From antique, sixteenth-century and Campanellan thought, particularly Stoicism, he depicted the order and harmony of Creation by means of allegory. He concluded with Campanella that contemplation of the Copernican universe offered a means of spiritual growth. To Poussin, the Stoic Divine Reason behind Nature became the sign of eternal salvation offered by God to those who accepted union with Him. In particular, he felt that this union depended upon Man’s use of the Christian sacraments to obtain the grace needed to act in co-operation with God. This fusion of religious feeling with philosophical conviction caused an exquisite integration of form with complex allegorical content, in an intense unity characteristic of the age of the Baroque. The masterly classical freedom and precision of Poussin’s final manner adapted all pictorial elements in order to arouse delectation, or spiritual delight, in the person who perceived his pictures. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

Nicolas Poussin's landscapes, The Four Seasons, 1660-1664, have been the subject of extensive analysis because of their enigmatic character and the modulation in Poussin's style in his last years. The meaning of these representations has, however, remained cryptic and, to some extent, neglected. / This thesis attempts to make a contribution toward unravelling the mystery of The Four Seasons. These profound works reflect Poussin's religious persuasion, knowledge of which is essential to an understanding of them. Poussin's religious convictions, however, are difficult to discern with any precision; for, although he died a Catholic, he was closely associated with the progressive thinking that influenced religious belief in the Baroque age, much of which was rejected by the Church of Rome. / Nevertheless, Poussin was undoubtedly a devout Christian, inspired particularly by the early Christian Fathers and Stoics. It is in nature, above all, though, that he perceived God's presence and message which he strove to capture in his "altarpiece" to the seasons.

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Texte remanié de : Dissertation : Kunstgeschichte : Universität Tübingen : 1999. / Bibliogr. p. [421]-466. Notes bibliogr. Index.

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Nicolas Poussin's two Self-Portraits, painted in 1649 and 1650, have been the subject of countless art-historical investigations, but remain only incompletely understood. This study attempts to draw the meanings of the self-images into clearer focus. To this end, the relationships between Poussin and the eventual recipients of the two portraits, Jean Pointel and Paul Freart, Sieur de Chantelou, are examined more probingly and are positioned centrally in the analysis of the works. A careful exploration of the web of associations among the three men reveals that Poussin's caution in dealing with Chantelou, his often jealous and emotional patron, was a factor of great consequence to the development of the Self-Portraits. Bearing this in mind, both Poussin's letters and the scholarly accounts which accept his written statements at face value, may be approached with a more critical eye. This practice, in turn, leads to a broadened range of possibilities for the interpretation of the two Self-Portraits, and to a greater appreciation of the extent to which Poussin's creations were affected by human dynamics.

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Examining a group of pictures painted in the early-to-mid 1630s, this dissertation sets out to demonstrate that Nicolas Poussin’s turn to the subject of dance helped him transform his style from the sensuous Venetian manner of his early years to the cool, crisp, relief-like approach that would characterize his mature work and form the basis for French Classicism in subsequent decades. Painting dancers allowed Poussin to work through the problem of arresting motion, to explore the affective potential of the body represented, and to discover a measured, geometric compositional method capable of containing and harnessing that potential. The resulting pictures, painted in Rome, were warmly received in Paris by a group of early collectors that included dancers, patrons, amateurs, and theorists of another modern French art: the ballet de cour. Ballet’s cultivation of a fiercely controlled physicality, its wild Dionysian characters and learned Apollonian conceits, above all, its insistence on a hidden geometric order underlying the chaos of embodied experience primed early French observers of Poussin’s dancing pictures to recognize something of themselves in his new approach. Though Poussin did not set out to define French Classicism, and though his brief service as premier peintre to Louis XIII demonstrates how ill-suited he was to the role of official artist, the fact that his dancing pictures shared so much—on the level of patronage, iconography, even, perhaps, theoretical underpinnings—with the ballet de cour may help explain why these works (and, indeed, Poussin himself) were so eagerly appropriated by France in the Classical Age.

This thesis examines the history, political climate and evolution of l'Academie royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, Paris (1648) as well as Nicolas Poussin's aesthetic contribution to its classical syllabus, and his influence on Charles Le Brun's classicizing perceptions via-a-vis the Academy during his tenure as Protector, Chancellor (for life), and Director. Explored too is the confrontation between the ancient guild system (la Maitrise), and the emerging idea of the ennoblement of the arts. Poussin's Israelites Gathering the Manna and Rebecca and Eliezer, analysed during les Conferences of the Academy, along with certain of the paintings of Charles Le Brun are considered to the conclusion that, at the outset, there was considerable flexibility with regard to les regles.