Poussin and the Poetics of Painting: Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso, and: Nicolas Poussin: Die Pest von Asdod

Both books under review originated as PhD dissertations and were completed in 1999. They have now been suitably revised and published in readable book form. In these days of overhasty publication, it is a pleasure to acknowledge the additional labors exerted by two talented younger scholars in bringing their works to final and, in both cases, highly successful conclusions.

The figure of Torquato Tasso strides like a colossus over the poetics of the first half of the seventeenth century, and the shadow he casts both as a poet and as a theoretician of poetry is very long indeed. The influence of his thought and his example, as has been recognized for some time, extends well beyond the realm of poetry, narrowly speaking, and makes itself felt in such related arts as theatrical and musical presentations, and in painting. Although art historians of an older generation have often obstinately resisted the very premise that any interdependence exists between the sister arts of painting and poetry — limiting their inquiries to iconographic identifications narrowly conceived — much work undertaken in more recent decades has sought to reintegrate the fine arts within the general culture that gave them birth. So far as Poussin is concerned, Panofsky's noble essay on the Arcadian Shepherds and Rensselaer Lee's classic study of the fundamental doctrine of ut pictura poesis stand out as exceptions, although even Lee, here and in many articles devoted to Tasso and the visual arts, remained oddly unconvinced that the functional relationship between poetry and the arts is more than merely metaphorical in nature. In recent years, however, much work has been devoted to deeper investigation of the critical and theoretical foundations of Poussin's achievement by scholars as diverse as Marc Fumaroli, Louis Marin, Elizabeth Cropper, and myself, and, among the younger generation, Anthony Colantuono, Françoise Graziani, and Giovanni Careri. Where Anthony Blunt had contented himself, for example, in identifying the sources of Poussin's notes on painting in his reading of Castelvetro and Tasso, among others, Cropper and Colantuono went further to show how these notes actually formed a coherent pattern revealing of Poussin's intention someday to write a treatise of his own. Marin brought to Poussin's Arcadian Shepherds an immense historical erudition combined with acutely applied phenomenological and linguistic analysis. Fumaroli, in impressive critical studies of the Inspiration of the Epic Poet and the recently discovered Sta. Francesca Romana, firmly grounded understanding of these pictures within the full context of the literary, musical, and religious culture of the Barberini court, and Graziani and Careri both devoted illuminating studies to poetry, the visual arts, and Poussin and Tasso in particular.

To all this Unglaub's book is a welcome addition. His intention is not only to treat of Poussin's paintings of subjects from Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, which indeed he does, but more broadly to investigate how Poussin immersed himself in Tasso's poetics, drawing lessons from it that apply to his handling of other subjects as well, whether drawn from history or from the repertoire of classical literature and poetry. He does not, of course, limit himself to Tasso alone but considers his thought in relation to other prominent poets and writers of poetics — in particular Giovanni Battista Marino, Poussin's early companion and protector — and he gives a fine account of the polemics engendered by the great Tasso-vs.-Ariosto debates. His discussion of the contributions of the great Lucas Holstenius to the impassioned debates over imitation and novelty, especially centered around Domenichino's Last Communion of St. Jerome (vigorously championed by Poussin), is especially good, both new and true. Unglaub is also very good in his analyses of the effects of Poussin's profound immersion in the arts of poetics in his paintings, his uses of peripety, for example, or the ways in which Poussin offers metaphorical or metonymical innovations of his own. When Tasso, for example, compares Armida's gazing upon Rinaldo's face to Narcissus contemplating his own image in the fountain, thereby suggesting that her love is purely selfish (autophilic), Poussin alters the metaphor by depicting the encounter in the guise of Diana and the sleeping Endymion, thereby introducing the idea that the young shepherd's slumber is enchanted. And this in turn, as Unglaub skillfully demonstrates, underscores the great utility of the critical concept of intertextuality when considering Poussin's work, the painter no less than the poet drawing upon a wide range of familiar and interrelated literary and visual models skillfully selected, varied upon, and interwoven in order to point a moral or lend new interpretive and emotional significance to a tale.

Elisabeth Hipp's exhaustive study of the Plague at Ashdod is, despite its great length (more than 400 pages devoted to a single picture), an absorbing account, though best taken in small bites. She has cast her net wide, and considers this simultaneously fascinating and disturbing painting from every conceivable point of view, from its role in the infamous Valguarnera affair, to its adaptation of Serlio's tragic stage set in conceiving the mise en scène (Bellori specifically cites the Plague at Ashdod as adopting a soggetto tragico), to its biblical sources and artistic antecedents, to its citation via Pliny of Aristides' pathetic image of a child vainly suckling at the breast of its dead mother, to the broader phenomena of the plague both as a contemporary scourge (the Plague of 1630) and in contemporary medical thought. Very little escapes her attention, whether drawn from the history of art, theater, seventeenth-century critical debates, religious history, or from the history of Poussin's own time.

All this is salutary in the extreme, and it was fascinating to me to take note of how so much is now being taken for granted, without apology, in current thought and scholarly inquiry that was not so very long ago vigorously contested. The methods of older generations have been in both books considerably expanded upon, and to good result. The benefits that have thus been gained for the understanding of Poussin in particular, and seventeenth-century art and history in general, are substantial. These two books, though quite different in mode of argumentation and presentation, are worthy additions to the scholarship on Poussin, and both will have the influence they merit.