Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with Saint John on Patmos

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)

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Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:05] In the middle of the 17th century, Rome was reborn. There was a tremendous building campaign. Think about the extravagant spaces of the church of Il Gesù, with this extraordinary illusionistic ceiling. This was operatic, it was theatrical.

Dr. Beth Harris: [0:20] It’s hard to imagine how, at the very same time that we have that Baroque theatricality, we have the classicism, the repose, the peacefulness, the rationalism of Poussin.

Dr. Zucker: [0:33] We’re in the Art Institute of Chicago, and we’re looking at Nicolas Poussin’s “Landscape with Saint 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.

Dr. Harris: [0:50] We’re looking at Saint John seated in the foreground, writing the Book of Revelation, writing about the end of time, the Second Coming of Christ, a really violent moment, but within this incredibly serene and peaceful landscape.

Dr. Zucker: [1:07] Of course, it’s Poussin who has been credited with inventing the ideal landscape and that’s exactly what we have here.

Dr. Harris: [1:14] It’s going to be very important for art history for actually centuries to come. Artists will look back at the classical landscape and reinterpret it.

Dr. Zucker: [1:22] In fact, Poussin’s style was so influential that it became the standard for the French Academy.

Dr. Harris: [1:28] And those who painted landscapes in this way, with a sense of rigor and order and rationalism and a kind of ideal landscape, became known as the Poussinistes.

Dr. Zucker: [1:36] 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 classicized pose. In fact, we think that Poussin took this pose directly from representations of river gods from ancient Rome. Of course Poussin, although he was French, was in Rome for most of his life.

Dr. Harris: [1:58] And that figure of Saint John is illuminated in the foreground, surrounded by the ruins of classical antiquity. We see ruins 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.

[2:14] 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.

Dr. Zucker: [2:22] The notion of passage, I think, is important to understanding the way that Poussin constructs a landscape. Saint John is placed in the very foreground right at the bottom of the painting, but we can’t race back to the middle ground where that temple is that you had mentioned. Instead, we have a couple of visual paths.

[2:38] We might try to go down and straight back, but there we see water, not once, but twice.

Dr. Harris: [2:43] And also a curtain of trees.

Dr. Zucker: [2:45] 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 eye slowly through this landscape so that we slow down and enjoy the space that he’s created.

Dr. Harris: [2:59] And at each point in the landscape, he gives us something to look at, the foreground with Saint John and the ruins, that pathway punctuated by trees into the middle ground with that temple and obelisk, and then again into the background with the mountains and then further back with the aerial perspective and more mountains and clouds. At each place, our eye has a place to rest in the landscape.

Dr. Zucker: [3:25] The landscape is not a specific place. This is very much a collage of ideal forms, and this makes sense for an artist whose aesthetic is being shaped by Rome, which itself is layers of cultures.

[3:37] Look, for instance, in this painting where you’ve got the classical Greek or Roman temple, but it’s next to an Egyptian obelisk. We’re actually seeing references to two cultures, both of which had ruled but had both fallen.

Dr. Harris: [3:49] The idea here, by showing those ruins, is to show that there’s 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 sense of order and structure and geometry.

Dr. Zucker: [4:06] But that is so counter to what we expect when we think about Saint John writing the apocalypse. This is a wildly violent vision. It is the end of time. So 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.

Dr. Harris: [4:26] Not just Poussin, but the circle of patrons that he found in Rome. We need to remember that there was more going on in Rome than the pope’s commissioning these theatrical works of art in the churches of the Counter-Reformation. Poussin found a circle of patrons, many of whom were interested in Stoic philosophy, and that he painted canvases like this one.

Dr. Zucker: [4:47] Poussin has accomplished what seems to be nearly impossible. He’s created poetry out of the rational, out of the ideal.

[4:54] [music]

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Cite this page as: Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris, "Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with Saint John on Patmos," in Smarthistory, December 4, 2015, accessed November 10, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/nicolas-poussin-landscape-with-saint-john-on-patmos/.