Sublime Poussin (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics Series)
Louis Marin considered the paintings and the writings of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), painter and theoretician of painting, an enduring source of inspiration. Since Marin did not live to write his proposed book on Poussin, the ten major essays in this volume will remain his definitive statement on the painter who inspired his most eloquent and probing commentary. At the center of Marin's inquiry into Poussins art are the theory and practice of "reading" paintings. Rather than explicate...
Search in google:
“Art history and art theory are inseparable. A history of art can be achieved only through the simultaneous construction of a theory of art.” These words of the eminent scholar and critic Louis Marin suggest why he considered the paintings and the writings of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), painter and theoretician of painting, an enduring source of inspiration. Poussin was the artist to whom Marin returned most faithfully over the years. Since Marin did not live to write his proposed book on Poussin, the ten major essays in this volume will remain his definitive statement on the painter who inspired his most eloquent and probing commentary.At the center of Marin’s inquiry into Poussin’s art are the theory and practice of “reading” paintings. Rather than explicate Poussin’s work through systematic textual and iconographic analysis, he sets out to explore a cluster of speculative questions about the meaning of pictorial art: Can painting be a discourse? If so, how can that discourse be deciphered? Marin’s horizon for interpreting Poussin depends more on the concepts of aesthetic philosophy and the insights of cultural history than on an account of the painter’s career or his relationship with his artistic predecessors. For example, he positions several of Poussin’s best-known landscapes with respect both to French seventeenth-century debates on the question of the sublime and to the philosophical tradition of reflection on the sublime. Among the topics Marin studies are the tempest as a major figure of the sublime in Poussin’s work, the presence of ruins in the paintings, Poussin’s use of the concept of metamorphosis, and the frequent presence of sleeping bodies in the work. The Poussin who emerges in these essays is preeminently a philosopher-artist whose painterly discourse embodies the limits of thought and of representation.BooknewsOriginally published in French in 1995 by Editions du Seuil. At his death in 1992, Marin, an eminent scholar and critic, was affiliated with the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. This volume comprises ten translated essays on the paintings and writings of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), the painter and theoretician of painting to whom Marin returned most consistently over the years. Among the topics: the tempest as a major figure of the sublime in Poussin's work, the presence of ruins in the paintings, Poussin's use of the concept of metamorphosis, and the frequent presence of sleeping bodies in the work. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
List of Illustrations and TablesIntroduction1Pt. I"Read the Story and the Picture"1Reading a Picture from 1639 according to a Letter by Poussin52Description of the Image: Concerning a Landscape by Poussin293Description of a Painting and the Sublime in Painting: Concerning a Poussin Landscape and Its Subject664Panofsky and Poussin in Arcadia1045The Classical Sublime: "Tempests" in Some Landscapes by Poussin120Pt. II"Great Theory and Practice Allied"6Fragments of a Walk through Poussin's Ruins1437Awakening Metamorphoses: Poussin, 1625-16351528A Gaze Rewarded, or Moses Saved from the Water1719Variations on an Absent Portrait: Poussin's Self-Portraits, 1649-165018310The Sublime in the 1670s: Something Indefinable, a "Je Ne Sais Quoi"?209App. 1'Sublime Poussin' (Louis Marin's summary outline, 1988)225App. 2Letter to Chantelou, 28 April 1639228App. 3Letter to Chantelou, 24 November 1647230Notes237Works Cited260
\ BooknewsOriginally published in French in 1995 by Editions du Seuil. At his death in 1992, Marin, an eminent scholar and critic, was affiliated with the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. This volume comprises ten translated essays on the paintings and writings of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), the painter and theoretician of painting to whom Marin returned most consistently over the years. Among the topics: the tempest as a major figure of the sublime in Poussin's work, the presence of ruins in the paintings, Poussin's use of the concept of metamorphosis, and the frequent presence of sleeping bodies in the work. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)\ \ \ \ \ From the Publisher“[Marin’s] mandarin prose, as foreign to our age of mass culture as Poussin’s paintings, seems as self-sufficient as the strangely in accessible art it so beautifully describes.”—Common Knowledge\ \ \
