“Poussin and God” exhibit on display at Musée du Louvre

PanARMENIAN.Net - Since Anthony Blunt’s magisterial monograph, The Paintings of Nicolas Poussin: a Critical Catalogue, was published in 1966, received opinion of the French artist’s religious convictions—both personal and as expressed in his paintings—has been that he stood at the very margins of the Roman Catholic faith; that he was more a Stoic than a Christian; that intellectually he was a libertin, not a catholique convainçu. In recent years, however, this leftish orthodoxy—decreed to be infallible by Jacques Thuillier in the Louvre’s 1994 mammoth Poussin exhibition catalogue—has come under scholarly attack, not least by the historian Marc Fumaroli, who showed not only that Poussin was an orthodox Roman Catholic, but that Blunt, by then an outed Communist spy, had suppressed evidence of the painter’s debt to the Jesuits, facts not consonant with the Communist atheist programme.

Now the revisionists’s research is incarnated in “Poussin and God” at the Musée du Louvre, organised by Nicolas Milovanovic, one of the museum’s curators, and Mickaël Szanto from the Sorbonne, The Art Newspaper reports.

With financial support from the Italian energy firm Eni, they have assembled 63 paintings and 34 drawings into seven sections: Poussin’s Roman Catholicism; his Holy Family paintings; the artist’s croyant patrons and friends; his privileging of Christian providence over pagan fate; the prominence he gave to the figure of Moses; the prominence he gave to the figure of Christ; and his landscapes as places of God’s self-disclosure. Through these chapters, the curators address the larger issues of Poussin’s work in the context of the Counter-Reformation, the originality of his mixture of sacred and pagan traditions, and the significance of Christ, often antetypically depicted in Old Testament scenes.

Poussin is hard to understand and sometimes hard to look at. Many have sought keys—philosophy (Blunt), love (Thuillier), poetry (the historian Alain Mérot), friendship (the historians Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey)—to unlock the heart of his endeavour. This exhibition will provide yet another, but none is ever sufficient. Poussin is like a sacrament: however often frequented, he is never exhausted, The Art News said.

The exhibit will run through June 29.