Nicolas Poussin Research Articles

Blue Boys: Maurice Pialat, Nicolas Poussin and the Work of Art

Maurice Pialat (1925–2003) in his Libération article “Éloge de Poussin” (1987) tells us that cinema has made no progress since the Lumière brothers’ first projected images. Provocatively, he informs his readers that only painting has progressed and, as such, remains the far more innovative art form. For all the pointed remarks directed with some force towards French film critics and filmmakers, Pialat’s short notes in Libé offer us something more. It is one of the few opportunities to consider the auteur’s critical and aesthetic approaches to filmmaking. While Pialat emphasises the failure of critics and filmmakers to elevate cinema to the level of art, the article more saliently invites us to analyse Pialat’s understanding of cinematic practice as an intricate enfolding of painterly and cinematic concepts. In this article I contend that, through a reading of the theoretical dimensions Pialat introduces in his “elegy” to the Classicist painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), along with an analysis of a selection of the director’s films, we not only discover Pialat’s film-philosophy; moreover, we discover new ways to study Pialat’s acute rendering of fraught manhood. Significantly, I argue, Pialat’s wrestling with masculinity (fatherhood, sexual desire, boyhood, and so on) reveals itself through a key element critical to Poussin’s aesthetic palette: the colour blue.

La Vie derrière soi: fins de la littérature by Antoine Compagnon

Reviewed by: La Vie derrière soi: fins de la littérature by Antoine Compagnon Ian Ellison La Vie derrière soi: fins de la littérature. By Antoine Compagnon. Paris: Éditions des Équateurs. 2021. 384 pp. €23. ISBN 978–2–382–84184–6. In Proust's La Prisonnière, as the narrator's favourite author Bergotte approaches the end of his life, he is perturbed to have no recollection of a brilliantly painted yellow wall in Vermeer's View of Delft that has been highly praised by an art critic. Spurning his doctors' advice to remain in bed, Bergotte insists upon seeing the painting once more and, as he gazes at the canvas, he remarks, 'c'est ainsi que j'aurais dû écrire' before collapsing. How does a writing life come to a close? With his retirement in sight and still deeply affected by the recent death of a close friend, this question plagued Antoine Compagnon in his final year of teaching at the Collège de France, in 2020. It subsequently provides the impetus for his final series of lectures, handsomely published a year later as a beautifully illustrated collection of thirteen essays under the title La Vie derrière soi: fins de la littérature. Literature, Compagnon declares, has an essential link with melancholy, mourning, and death. Indeed, paraphrasing and inverting Montaigne, Compagnon remarks towards the beginning of this collection that in what follows it is less the case that 'la mort n'est pas le but mais le bout de la vie', but rather that 'la fin n'est pas le bout mais le but de la littérature' (p. 7). This is not new territory for Compagnon (moreover, his essais could be conceived of as an hommage to Roland Barthes's provocation in his own final lecture series at the Collège de France that 'je pourrais décider de ne plus écrire', p. 19). Nor is it particularly ground-breaking as a point of departure. Yet these lectures do shed new light on the well-tilled fields of lateness and late style. Across the vastness of European culture it is not necessarily the case that, as Compagnon claims, the late works of writers have aroused less curiosity than the old-age style of painters and musicians, who may be more clearly afflicted by the failures of their body, hand, eye, or ear (in his second essay Compagnon recalls Gian Lorenzo Bernini's waspish pronouncement upon observing Nicolas Poussin's last paintings in Paris in 1665 that 'People should stop working at a certain age; for [End Page 238] all men end up declining', p. 50). Nevertheless, it is true that the notions of Spätstil and Altersstil are typically exemplified and theorized with far greater frequency in the Germanic—and, latterly, Anglophone—sphere than in the field of French letters: Shakespeare, Goethe, Beethoven, and Rembrandt are notably invoked, for example, by Adorno, Benn, Broch, and Neumann. It is also, overwhelmingly, a man's game. While Compagnon's essays still focus predominantly on male canonical writers and the theoretical scaffolding of the book is notably Anglo-German, his application of the discourse of late style to French writers is illuminating. In his fifth essay, for instance, Compagnon draws on the work of Georg Simmel to clarify 'pourquoi il n'y a pas ou peu d'artistes français dans le canon habituel des stylistes tardives' (p. 110). Pointing to Victor Hugo in the 1830s and Rimbaud in the 1870s, he observes how many French writers remain youthful in cultural memory: 'Conformément au mythe de la revolution politique et esthétique, ce sont en France des jeunes rebelles qui font l'art en mettant à bas les idoles' (p. 110). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the French Revolution is the elephant in the room that does not forget: if ageing and late style connote a certain bourgeois conservatism, it is worth remembering that 'En France, depuis le romantisme, le bourgeois est un salaud; en Allemagne, il est un héros' (p. 110). La Vie derrière soi runs the gamut of canonical Western European literature, is pithily and personably written, and is a pleasure to read. It...

Helen Frankenthaler: Something new in terms of nature

Originally presented as a talk at Turner Contemporary Margate in 2014 in association with the exhibition Making Painting: Helen Frankenthaler and JMW Turner, the article explores the importance of Helen Frankenthaler’s exposure to the work of Paul Cézanne in exhibitions in New York in the early 1950s for the making of her breakthrough painting Mountains and Sea in 1952 and speculates about her engagement with the work of Nicolas Poussin in her painting Eden (1956).

CONFLICT, TRAGEDY, AND INTERRACIALITY: BOB THOMPSON PAINTS VERGIL'S CAMILLA

In The Death of Camilla (1964), Black American painter Bob Thompson fascinates, disturbs, and provokes enduring questions about race in the United States. In this painting (Figure 1), multicolored nudes clash in battle around two figures frozen in a moment of anguish: a light-skinned female warrioress dying in the arms of a dark-hued male opponent. The power of this painting lies not only in its raw emotion, symbolism, and color, but also in Thompson's daring signification upon the story of Camilla from Vergil's Aeneid and on a seventeenth-century drawing by Nicolas Poussin. While a relatively ‘underknown’ artist, during his life Robert Louis Thompson (1937–1966) received extensive recognition for his compelling reconfigurations of the European old masters and their Classical (Greco-Roman) subjects. Thompson, according to his early biographer, Judith Wilson, may also be ‘the first American artist to put the nation's interracial sex life/sex fantasies on public view.’ In many of his works of reception, Thompson combines these two artistic preoccupations into compelling pieces that foreground tragic contradictions around interraciality in the United States. In his The Death of Camilla painting, I argue, Thompson expands upon the symbolic trajectory of Vergil's story and ‘colors’ Poussin in such a way as to re-present Camilla as collateral damage of the sort of nation building that necessitates interracial conflict.

Li Pittori Parlano con l’Opere: Visualizing Poetry in Practice in Early Modern Italian Art

The relative sophistication of artists in the early modern era is contested, especially with regards to their educational backgrounds. On one hand, Dempsey-esque intellectual history is vested in touting the structured, literary curricula in art-educational institutions; while on the other, a complete rejection of the “artist-philosopher” as historical fiction seeks to undermine this hegemonic construct. This study argues that the lack of early formal education in the cases of artist like Annibale Carracci and Nicolas Poussin, who, unlike Peter Paul Rubens, did not have a firm foundation in the classics and languages that would allow them to engage directly with source material, would later be supplemented through their relationships with literary figures in the circles of Torquato Tasso, Giambattista Marino, and the Accademia dei Gelati. In addition to such relationships, informal exchanges, gatherings, and supplemental materials like Giovanni Paolo Gallucci’s Della Simmetria could be called upon when treating poetic subjects. With intimate knowledge of vernacular poetry, literati themselves participating in lectures and studio visits, and, finally, quick reference guides for subject matter, these artists were able to produce works that spoke to both poetic and artistic theory of the day, as one naturally informed the other.

Time-of-Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry Imaging of Cross Sections from the Bacchanals Paintings of Nicolas Poussin.

The two paintings Infant Bacchanals (Museo Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome, Italy) executed by Nicolas Poussin (Les Andelys, 1594-Rome, 1665) in around 1626 are thought to have been painted "a guazzo", which means either with a glue or with an egg binding medium. To date, this has never been confirmed through analysis. Dual-beam time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (TOF-SIMS), using a bismuth cluster liquid metal ion gun and an argon gas cluster ion beam, allows the mapping of organic and inorganic matter on paintings cross sections, with the possibility to acquire submicrometer-resolution mass spectrometry images of the sample, together with high mass resolution using a delayed extraction of secondary ions. The surfaces of cross sections from both paintings were prepared beforehand either by polishing or by microtome cutting and then cleaned with the gas cluster ion beam directly inside the vacuum chamber of the instrument. The nature of the binders in the two paintings was investigated by TOF-SIMS analyses. By considering the uneven physical properties of the heterogeneous analyzed surfaces, several high-resolution images were recorded with different instrument settings. The detection of lipids seems to point toward an oil-containing medium, rather than a glue-binding medium. An emulsion made of oil and glue is another hypothesis to be explored to better understand the artist's working methods in his early career.

HISTORY PAINTING AND ITS CHANGING SUBJECTS

ABSTRACTTraditional European history painting showed scenes from scripture or Greco‐Roman history. These were the most important paintings because they showed the most important subjects. The seventeenth‐century art of Nicolas Poussin was a significant model for this tradition. In the late eighteenth century, however, artists began to present contemporary subjects in history paintings. In an influential essay published in 1938, Edgar Wind argued that it was these late eighteenth‐century painters who first showed present‐day events outside of Europe and then turned to contemporary subjects. Soon enough, present‐day events were as important as those depicted in old master history painting. This was a decisive change in how both history and art were understood. This essay collection charts the development of history painting using well‐illustrated case studies discussing famous figures as well as some lesser‐known artists. It features accounts of traditional history painting; discussions of the marketplace for this artistic genre in the eighteenth century; and varied examples of history painting after modernism, which allowed that any important subject whatsoever can, with sufficient motivation, become the subject of a history painting. As such, we now have contemporary history paintings showing present‐day political developments, the global economy, and the concerns of ecology.

Immortality.

This essay is an exercise in what might be called Metaphysical Sociology. It suggests that in the secular modern Western world immortality has become the great question mark. It explores possible responses, drawing on a range of fictional examples, including the novel and film Gone with the Wind and Nicolas Poussin's painting of The Last Supper. It draws a contrast between vitality and ego, on the one hand, and soul, on the other.

Idyllic, Pastoral and Abstract: Cy Twombly’s Reinvented Arcadia

Cy Twombly’s painting Arcadia (1958) refers to the Greek region in the Peloponnese where Theocritus placed his shepherds in his bucolic poems and, Virgil transformed to a symbol, the distant and utopian locus amoenus of pleasure and love. In painting, Arcadia became a theme, an ideal and classical landscape in Nicolas Poussin’s canvases. Twombly used elements from Virgil’s classical Arcadia to construct a new one. As an American, the painter did not share the burden of the cultural heritage that other European artists would feel. Like the Romans, who freely interpreted Greek myths in the past, playing with a cultural heritage that was not their own, Twombly provided a fresh look to classical subjects with the approach of an ‘outsider’. From the late 1950s on, he took the liberty of painting a graffiti-like Arcadia, bucolic landscape-like paintings or green monochrome versions of the subject. Through the study of Twombly’s Arcadia, as an example of a classical subject treated in contemporary painting, this article focuses on the artist’s constant dialogue with Antiquity and shows how the painter’s balance between imitatio of the ancients and inventio of his own means achieve a renewal of the subject itself.

Natalie Charkow Hollander: Into The Stone

Natalie Charkow Hollander:Into The Stone Karen Wilkin (bio) "Sculpture doesn't leave you alone," Natalie Charkow Hollander says. "Painting stays on the wall; it doesn't always demand attention. It doesn't fall on top of you and break, or hurt you." Despite these misgivings, Charkow Hollander has been a passionate, committed sculptor for almost 60 years, one who has transformed our very conceptions of what a sculpture can be for more than 40. In 1974, after almost two decades of making abstract reliefs in metal, she abandoned abstraction and welding for figuration and carving. At a time when much serious vanguard sculpture was being defined in terms of random assemblies of soft or ephemeral materials, she chose to work in that most recalcitrant, labor intensive, brutally present, and traditional of materials, carved stone, exploring the possibilities of using recognizable imagery and narrative, based on works by old and modern masters, from Piero della Francesca to Henri Matisse, including Titian and Nicolas Poussin. But Charkow Hollander doesn't simply translate her two-dimensional sources into three dimensions. Instead she distills them into new kinds of ambiguous objects, drawing us close because of their intimate scale, which belies their actual weight and bulk. (Some are single blocks about 18 inches across, while others are less than half that size; the single blocks are sometimes further subdivided, while occasionally multiple blocks are stacked to make larger works.) We recognize the allusions, usually aided by her titles, but our perceptions of space are tested as much as our knowledge of the history of art. We are aware that we are confronting works made of impenetrable stone, but instead of considering what is before us as a space-displacing mass, we mentally enter an [End Page 256] illusionistic space, the way we do a Renaissance painting where the literal surface of the canvas is dissembled, treated as a window into a vision of a three-dimensional world. Essentially, Charkow Hollander reinvented the relief, reversing our spatial expectations. Instead of building up masses from a background plane to suggest forms in space, as in traditional relief, she treats the surface of her stone block as if it were a transparent boundary between the world around us and the interior world of her sculptures, like the surface of a Renaissance painting. Charkow Hollander's images retreat from that plane and from us, moving further and further into the deeply undercut space of the stone. We feel as if we were allowed to penetrate secret zones, as if we were able to see into depths that seem to exceed the limits of the block. (Despite their potent evocation of measured distance, the sculptures average about three inches deep, with a few of the largest works measuring about five inches.) The blunt, economically rendered figures that inhabit these spaces retain the memory of the stone's density, yet perhaps because of their origins in drawings or paintings, they also suggest lightness and transparency in ways completely at odds with the material's association with mass and bulk. It's as if Charkow Hollander were striving to overcome the irreducible physicality of her medium, to claim for sculpture some of the qualities of the paintings she admires most. Traditional reliefs project toward the viewer, with foreground elements presented most saliently and distant elements suggested as shallow, incised drawing. Forms deep within Charkow Hollander's carvings can be as sturdy as those closest to us, while in some works, both near and far forms can be aggressively flattened on their front surfaces, as if they had been compressed in an attempt to break through the surface of the block. The acknowledgement of that constraining barrier can even overwhelm the image that is the nominal subject of the sculpture. We feel that we are not looking at the scene, but that we have entered into it. The flattened passages suggest that we are inside [End Page 157] Charkow Hollander's fictive spaces, magically projected into the block, so that the surface of the stone is now behind us. Yet we cannot move freely in that interior. It exists in discrete layers, like the progressions of a pop-up book. Charkow...

Revisiting the identification of commercial and historical green earth pigments

Green earth is a common green pigment based on celadonite and glauconite, used since Antiquity by artists. Two geological minerals, eight commercial green earth pigments and a sample taken from a historical location in Monte Baldo were characterized. A set of different techniques including X-Ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy coupled to energy dispersive spectroscopy (SEM-EDS) and numerous spectroscopies: spectrophotocolorimetry, near and mid infrared, Raman, Mössbauer were used to identify the structure and composition of the different earths. The results highlight complex composition with the presence of various phases, which can be due to the pigment sampling at a different location in the same deposit. Mobile and non-invasive analyses were carried out in order to suggest a protocol for the identification of green earth in artworks, and more specifically to distinguish celadonite and glauconite. With the available mobile non-invasive techniques, and the above analyses on the raw pigments, the green area in Nicolas Poussin’s painting, Bacchanales d’enfants (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica (GNAA), Rome) was examined as a case study.

Les paysages composés chez Poussin. Académisme et classicisme

Pierre Francastel’s text here published, was originally a paper given during a symposium devoted to Nicolas Poussin, which took place in Paris on 19th-21st September 1958. All papers were included in a volume published by the Éditions du CNRS (Paris, 1960). In that paper, Francastel offers an interpretation of the way Poussin’s work evolved, and shows the deep invention in his painting.

‘A revolution in art’: Maria Callcott on Poussin, Painting, and the Primitives

In 1845 the Athenaeum bemoaned the loss to the nation of an ‘exquisite fragment’ by Filippino Lippi: the Angel Adoring once owned by the painter Augustus Wall Callcott and his wife Maria (1785–1842). This early painting, probably bought by Maria herself, epitomizes the revolutionary ideas set out in her publications on art. Initially known for her travel writing, she launched her art historical career in 1820 with a pioneering biography of Nicolas Poussin. A friend of painters such as Thomas Lawrence and J. M. W. Turner, she was especially close to Charles Eastlake and shared his desire to promote late medieval and early Renaissance art. On honeymoon in 1827 and 1828, Maria viewed such Primitive works in Germany and Italy, meeting the curators and artists who were producing a ‘revolution’ in taste. The trip resulted in Maria’s groundbreaking Essays Towards the History of Painting (1836). Prevented by ill health from making a substantial published contribution to the history of art, Maria Callcott influenced artistic debates of the day through her informal salon in Kensington. This article examines how she used her personal networks and travel experience to reassess works by the old masters, challenging conventional ideas, while also helping to combat prejudice against the female connoisseur.

Rhetorical Figures of Viewing in Classical and Academic Art

The article is a mirror for the author’s work on the iconographic motif of Venus pudica. Like Venus, the image of a sleeping satyr from the famous Barberini Faun statue has become a figure of visual rhetoric in modern times, with a similar meaning of viewing the human body, but this time a male body. French artist Nicolas Poussin and Italian painter Giovanni Battista Pittoni used this recognizable iconic form to express a complex set of meanings, often in opposition to each other. In the arsenal of academic art, it has been applied in creating artistic images by Russian painters of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Anton Losenko, Andrei Ivanov, and his brilliant son Alexander. At first glance, this article only continues, using new material, the series of studies initiated by Aby Warburg (1866–1929) on visual patterns invented in antiquity that then became part of Modern art. However, unlike iconological studies, which only state such borrowings, the author examines these visual metaphors from the perspective of their internal form, which for a long time could hold and transmit important messages from the artist to others. The author believes that rhetoric from antiquity until the beginning of the nineteenth century (in Russia to the middle of the nineteenth century), and in academic art even later, held a leading position in the education of the artistic consciousness of masters of fine arts, and, directly or indirectly, in the management of practical activities — even playing the role of art theory, which began to form as an independent discipline at the turn of the twentieth century.

Dekoracja stropu w kamienicy Jacoba Heinricha Zerneckego przy ul. Żeglarskiej 16 oraz dzieje toruńskiej rodziny malarskiej Tiedemanów

Bei Renovierungsarbeiten im Haus in der ul. Żeglarska 16 in Thorn wurde eine Dekoration in Form einer illusionistischen Malerei gefunden, die an der Holzdecke im Flur angebracht ist. Die zentrale Szene zeigt eine Allegorie Die Wahrheit als Tochter der Zeit, auf der Chronos eine nackte Frau, die Personifikation der Wahrheit, in den Himmel trägt und sie vor den Einflüssen der Zwietracht und des Neides rettet, die als zwei Frauen gezeigt werden, die am Rand der Szene sitzen. Die Malerei ist die Wiederholung einer Komposition von Nicolas Poussin, die er im Jahr 1641 im Auftrag von Kardinal Richelieu ausführte und die für die Decke des privaten Appartements in dessen Kardinalspalast in Paris bestimmt war. Dieses Werk wurde in Europa durch mehrere Versionen von Abbildungen verbreitet, von denen die von Bernard Picard der Thorner Version am nächsten steht. Die Verzierung der Decke wird vervollständigt durch Putten mit Obstkörben, Engel sowie vier Porträts, die als skulptierte Büsten stilisiert sind. Sie stellen den Eigentümer des Hauses, Jacob Heinrich Zernecke, seine Frau Concordia und seine Eltern Johann und Christine dar. Die Analyse archivalischer Quellen lässt den Schluss zu, dass mit den Dekorationsarbeiten der örtliche Meister Johann Tiedeman der Jüngere beauftragt war, dessen Sohn Georg bei seiner Taufe am 13. August 1702 Johanna und Concordia Zernecke als Taufpaten hatte. Die Entstehungszeit der Malerei lässt sich auf die Zeit kurz nach der Rückkehr der frisch verheirateten Jacob Heinrich und Concordia Zernecke nach Thorn im Juni 1702 datieren. Aus der Familie Tiedeman, die seit 1631 mit Thorn verbunden war, stammten drei Maler, die Mitglied der Thorner Zunft waren: Johann der Ältere (1633-1705) sowie seine Söhne Johann der Jünger (1669 – nach 1718) und Daniel (1674 – nach 1722). Darüber hinaus machte Michael (1671-1747), der dritte Sohn von Johann dem Älteren, eine Beamtenkarriere, die er mit der Funktion des Ältesten im Stadtrat der Thorner Neustadt krönte.

People-Flowers: Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Poussin’s Masterpiece Empire Of Flora (Images and Symbols of Flowers in Art of the 17<sup>th</sup> century)

During the ecological crisis, it is especially important to study the heritage of world art, which shows the harmonious connection between man and nature. The subject of our examination are the images and symbols of flowers in the masterpieces of the artist Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665). We study them in the context of the ancient heritage and culture of the 15th–17th centuries (poetry of Ovid, music, sculpture, theater, and ballet). Based on the ancient mythology of the masters of the Renaissance and Classicism in the paintings Primavera, The Empire of Flora gave their interpretation of the eternal theme of life and its cyclical renewal. The features of the artistic language of Poussin as the leader of classicism are shown. The mythological parallels of the image of Flora in the art of China are revealed.

Re-interpretation of the Old Masters' practices through optical and rheological investigation: The presence of calcite

Abstract Lead white, composed of a mixture of cerussite and hydrocerussite (respectively PbCO3 and Pb3(CO3)2(OH)2), is often associated in paintings with other white pigments, especially calcite. By combining in-situ analyses with paint reconstructions, we attempt to get a better understanding of the role of this addition of calcite and to investigate how artists may have used it to modify the properties of their paints. Lead-based white pigments of a Dutch 17th-century nuancier have been analysed as well as historical paintings. Two examples are given: one from a painting by Roger van der Weyden, in the 15th century, and one by Nicolas Poussin, in the 17th century, from specific zones that indicate the addition of calcite. The presence of calcite and pigments enhances both the optical and the rheological properties. Visible reflectance spectroscopy was carried out on pure paints as well as mixtures and indicated an increase in the transparency of the paint mixture in comparison to pure lead white. Rheological measurements also indicated an increase in the elastic and viscous moduli, as well as of the yield stress again in comparison to pure lead white. Calcite could thus have been used to assist in the creation of impasto effects in lead white paints.

Playing With Paint or Painting With Play

In composing Play, Beckett paid more than lip service to painting as his inspira tional source by liberating, within dramatic form, the 'viewer's gaze', a process that Louis Marin finds to be integral to the reading of painting. Evidence of Beckett's motivation arises from the scrutiny of Play's three fragmented mono logues and his choreography of light. The result illustrates that Beckett's passion for the spectator's freedom of gaze embedded in the reading of painting beco mes transposed into the theatre. To state Samuel Beckett's love for the arts uncovers no secret. In his authorized biography, James Knowlson documents Beckett's apprecia tion for visual art and its corresponding influence on his aesthetic (21). Beckett's fascination with visual art unveils itself in his theatrical crea tions through thematic and imagistic quotations as well as compositional structure. A structural examination of Play reveals that Beckett embodied in dramatic form many principles of painting. Louis Marin offers a hypothesis on the reading of painting, which illuminates Beckett's dra matic technique by describing the relationship between viewer and pain ting and thus, the characteristics of visual art present in the design of Play. While no direct link exists between Marin and Beckett, striking similarities emerge from the works that inspired them and from their thinking. Their love of visual art led them to frequent art galleries (espe cially the National Gallery in London) and, coincidentally, both posses sed a fondness for Nicolas Poussin's works (Knowlson, 186; Marin 1977, 47). In aesthetics, Beckett and Marin both emphasize the link between form and content in terms of the primacy of recipient integration with aesthetic object, the concept explored here (Beckett 1983, 27; Marin 1980, 294). Evidence of Beckett's motivation for spectator implication arises from the piece's fragmentation of monologue, choreography of light, and textual composition. Beckett's Play exists as a theatre piece and, although Marin limits his analysis to painting and language, one no

The works of Arnold Böcklin in the art of Alexander Benois

The article is the first attempt to examine the question of the influence of Arnold Bocklin’s works on Alexander Benois in symbolic and mythological aspects. On the basis of the artist’s memoirs, the source of Benois’s acquaintance with the art of Bocklin was revealed and analyzed — the black-and-white reproduction of the painting “Isle of the Dead” in the Munich magazine “Die Kunst fűr alle”. Employing formal and stylistic analysis, the author came to theconclusion that this reproduction had an impact on such graphic works by Benois as “Castle”, “Castle. Two Towers”, “The tombstone of the Fool”. The images of the fauns in the paintings by Boсklin had an influence on similar images in the works by Benois (“Gardens of Diana”, the sketch for the cover of the collection “The Book of a New Theater”, “Apollo and Daphne”). Based on the complex method combining formal and stylistic observations with the analysis of Benois’s diaries, his works on the history of European art and archival documents (the inventory of Benois’ art collection), the author concluded that the images of fauns in Benois’s works were also influenced by similar images in the works by Nicolas Poussin and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione. The article also explores for the first time how Richard Muther’s views on Bocklin’s art (described in R. Muther’s book “The History of Painting in the 19 Century”) affected Benois’s perception of Bocklin. It has been established that it was Muther’s words about the mythological characters in the works of Bocklin that influenced the images of ancient mythology and even folklore in Benois’s art (sheets “Letter ‘L’: Forest, Moon, Lechy” and “Letter ‘O’: Lake” from “The Alphabet in the pictures of Alexander Benois”, “Apollo and Daphne”).

Embodying disillusionment: Poussin’s blinded giants

ABSTRACTExtending the traditional view of the giant of ancient myth as the personification of the father, the giant also affords the metaphorical elaboration of infantile fantasies of grandiosity derived from identification with the omnipotent parent. Conversely, the fallen and typically blinded giant embodies disillusionment: with the idealised parental imago, and also with one’s own illusions of omnipotence. Nicolas Poussin’s successive aesthetic interpretations of the giants of Greek legend highlight the symbolic dialectics of size, and offer a window onto the illusions and disillusionments that are intrinsic to generational succession, and accompany the confrontation of various realities—of dependency, vulnerability, maturation, achievement, aging, loss and death.