Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with Saint John on Patmos, 1640

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)

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.