Hello, and welcome to "Insider Insights".
My name is Marianna Siciliano, I'm an Educator in Public Programs and Creative Practice.
While The Met is temporarily closed, we are bringing the Museum to you
through a series of up-close looks at objects and exhibitions with Met Experts.
I'm joined today by Keith Christiansen, the John Pope-Hennessy Chairman
of the Department of European Paintings, who's going to share his reflections
on a work of art by Nicholas Poussin, and his perspectives on the painting,
given the experience of our current moment.
Keith, thank you for being here and for sharing this
with us, I'll hand things over to you.
It's a pleasure, Marianna.
And thank you for this wonderful opportunity.
I first of all I would like to take this occasion
to wish you all the best and hope that you are safe.
For the past month and a half, I have been working from home that's
where I am now. I happen to live on the Upper West Side with easy access, both to
Riverside Park, and to Central Park.
It's made me appreciate, even more ​acutely the importance of nature in our lives.
Especially at this time of year with the rejuvenation of nature.
I try to get out for a quick bike ride in the morning, weather permitting, and a walk
with my wife in the afternoon.
Our favorite is the North Woods where the city disappears.
You're magically transported mentally to the wilds of nature. For urban dwellers in the
17th century, whether you lived in Amsterdam, Rome, or in Paris, landscape paintings provided
a similar mental release from everyday pressures.
They provided a moment of reflection, and an occasion to consider our place in the larger
scheme of things.
I cannot think of anything more important
to us now, not only because of the pandemic.
But given the impact that modern life has had on the environment.
And that took me to one of the supreme masterpieces in The Met: Nicholas Poussin’s sublime painting
of the giant hunter of Greek mythology, Orion, who, having been blinded,
is being guided towards the healing rays of the rising sun.
It's one of six paintings by this great French artist, which makes
The Met's collection, the largest in this hemisphere.
And as with some of The Met's greatest masterpieces, let's say Bruegel’s "Harvesters",
Van Eyck’s wonderful diptych of the Crucifixion, Jacques Louis David’s
"Death of Socrates",
we owe the purchase of this picture in 1924 to the brilliant curator, Bryson Burroughs.
Burroughs was actually trained as a painter.
He was very much influenced by Puvis de Chavannes
who he met, and at The Met he worked in collaboration for a certain
period with the Great British critic Roger Fry.
Roger Fry was a champion of both Cézanne and of Poussin, remember that Cézanne was a huge
admirer of Poussin.
So Burroughs was especially well placed to
appreciate Poussin’s enigmatic painting.
Why do I say enigmatic? Let's look first at the picture, and then
discuss a bit the subject. That proverbial grain of sand around which Poussin created this remarkable pearl.
Framed by the trees of an old growth forest,
we see Orion from the back, striding down a path.
A man stands on his shoulders to guide him.
His name is Cedalion. He steadies himself with one hand and points with the other while he
looks down and you can see he's in conversation with someone on the ground.
Vapors can be seen rising from the forest floor, forming clouds that encircle Orion’s head.
Standing nonchalantly and observing the scene
below with a curious, look of detachment, is the goddess Diana.
we recognize her by her quiver and the arrows and the crescent moon that adorns her hair
for she is the goddess of the moon as well as of the hunt.
The edges of the clouds she rests on are
tinted with the sun’s rays,
but they also block the light from Orion’s face.
On the ground, in shadow, are three further figures.
One is in conversation with Cedalion
he is Hephaestus, perhaps better known from his Roman mythological name of Vulcan
And he is pointing the way towards the rising sun somewhere, beyond the trees.
The two other fingers are clearly astonished at the sight of the giant.
Note that these three figures are echoed by three stumps of felled trees, one of which has
set forth a branch of oak leaves. Poussin always saw his figures interlocked
with the forms of nature.
In the distance is a magnificent view of
a mountainous landscape with, beyond, the sea, a kind of bay on the horizon.
You can see a lighthouse, and between the branches at the left can be seen
the brightening light of dawn
It's the distance view that reminds us that
throughout his career Poussin was a passionate student of Nature.
He made frequent excursions into the Roman countryside
with his compatriot, Claude Lorraine, to draw from nature.
Sometimes the drawings were of distant vistas.
Sometimes they were studies, a stand of trees with light filtering through the branches and the path
leading from the shade into the sun.
Often these are done as here with the brush and washes of diluted ink.
Though they have not survived, he must also
made countless studies of individual plants, for how else could he arrive at the roots and bark
and leaves of those wonderful stumps?
We are bound to ask ourselves, were they
cut by woodsmen, or were they felled by storms.
In either case, the new shoot with leaves points to nature's capacity to regenerate itself.
From these drawings he would create his formal
compositions back in his studio.
Poussin was not interested in the purely topographical views that we see in some of his drawings.
His object was to employ the particularities of nature that he studied in the open air
to form a poetic idea, or to evoke a distant past, what one perceptive critic has called:
“Nature viewed through the lens of time.”
To achieve this goal he introduced figures taken from Greek and Roman mythology.
This brings us to Poussin’s decision to put into this beautiful
landscape the figure of Orion, someone better known as a constellation in the heavens
than as a mythological figure.
The print on the right is from an atlas of stars published in 1603.
Now Orion is a problematic figure,
he never figures prominently in
any great narratives, from antiquity.
The signal event of his story was his rape of
the beautiful Merope, whose outraged father then blinded him.
Told that the sun would restore his blindness, Orion set out for Lemnos.
He later hunted with Diana on Crete, and was either killed by her or by a giant scorpion
that she summoned when he also attacked her.
You can see what I mean,
a very compromised figure.
Why on earth would Poussin construct a landscape around such an ambivalent mythological figure?
Well, scholars have debated this question for over a century,
and Poussin’s two principal biographers, both of whom actually knew
this picture, pass over the matter in silence.
I don’t intend to enter into the intellectual fray.
Scholarship is sometimes like those blogs that begin in response to a question
and end up in a dispute about something completely different.
What I can say is that in 1944, the scholar Ernst Gombrich
demonstrated that what Poussin knew of Orion he almost certainly got from a common
reference book, "The Mythologae of Natale Conte".
In which the myths of antiquity are
explaining sometimes rather facetiously as allegories.
Now The Mythologae was translated into French in 1627,
that's the edition I have on the page, on the screen.
And on the page you see on the screen,
Poussin would have read how Orion had three fathers:
Jupiter, air, Neptune, water, and Apollo, the sun.
How this came about, is a story that doesn't need to interest us right now.
Conte writes: “Apollo, that is, the Sun, draws
vapors from the water and raises them into the air;
Jupiter is air and Neptune the spirit of the waters.
They are the triple-father of Orion
And when brought together they cause winds, rain, and thunder.
Orion, the diffusion of these vapors is signified by Orion’s trip to Chios.
His blinding, his retreat, and healing through the sun,
as directed by Vulcan, “signifies nothing less than the circularity and mutual generation
and corruption of the elements.”
So with this in hand, we get the idea that
in some sense the picture represents an allegorical metaphoric poetic terms, the cycles of nature
and the formation of clouds.
What about Diana?
We are told that Diana is present as the transforming force because the moon
is the beams which transforms the vapors into rain and storms.
So what we have is this peaceful lands--,
in this peaceful landscape is the portent, in Orion, of the storms of life.
That was a recurring theme in the letters of Poussin as he aged and his health declined
and he was 64 when he painted this picture.
Orion as a portent of tempests was a metaphor
employed by poets, as well as by Poussin.
For example, we find it in Edmund Spencer’s The Fairie Queen.
We are told that the patron of this picture, Michel Passart,
was enormously erudite, and it may well have been him who suggested to Poussin
the theme of the picture. But it was Poussin who turned it into poetic terms.
Passart we know installed the picture
in a gallery especially reserved exclusively for landscapes by various artists.
Among which was one by Rubens. You might imagine him going from one to the other,
appreciating the peculiar vision each artist brought to their encounters with Nature.
Another encounter, the one with which I want to end this
brief survey of Poussin's marvelous picture, happened in 1821 in London.
When the picture was exhibited at the British Academy.
It was there seen by William Hazlitt, one of the
finest critics of his day, an acquaintance of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and of Keats.
In other words, part of that tight romantic circle.
He wrote an essay about his encounter with
the picture, an essay that I want to read from, not only because it was so beautifully
written, and has been so influential, but because it reminds me of how powerfully pictures
such as this can work upon our imagination.
So here's William Hazlett:
Orion, the subject of this landscape,… is called by Homer, 'a hunter of shadows, himself a shade.'
He was the son of Neptune; and having lost
an eye in some affray between the Gods and men, was told that if he would go to meet the
rising sun, he would recover his sight. He is represented setting out on his journey,
with a man on his shoulders to guide him, a bow in his hand, and Diana, in the clouds greeting him.
He stalks along, a giant upon the earth,
and reels and falters in his gait, as if just awakened out of sleep, or uncertain of his way;
you see his blindness, though his back is turned. Mists arise around him, and veil the sides of the green forests;
earth is dank and fresh with dews…and in the distance are seen the blue hills
and sullen ocean. Nothing was ever more finely conceived or done.
It breathes the spirit of the morning; its moisture,
its repose, its obscurity, waiting for the miracle
of light to kindle it into smiles;
the whole is, like the principal figure in it, 'a forerunner of the dawn.'
The same atmosphere tinges and imbues every object,
the same dull light 'shadowy sets off' the face of nature:
One feeling of vastness of strangeness, and of primeval forms pervades the painter's Canvas,
and we're thrown back upon the first integrity of things.
This great and learned man might be said to see nature through the glass of time.
With a laborious and mighty grasp, he puts nature into the mould of the ideal and antique;
he was among painters more than any one else, what Milton was among poets.
There is in both something of the same pedantry,
the same stiffness, but also the same elevation,
the same grandeur, the same mixture of art and nature,
the same richness of borrowed materials, the same unity of character.
Neither the poet nor the painter lowered the subjects they treated,
but filled up the outline in the fancy, and added strength and reality to it;
and thus not only satisfied,
but surpassed the expectations of the spectator and the reader.
This is held for the triumph and the perfection
of works of art.
To give us nature, such as we see it, is well and deserving of praise;
To give us nature such as we have never seen it,
but often wished to see it, is better, and deserving of higher praise.
He who can show the world in its first naked glory, […] can recall time past, transport us to distant places,
and join the regions of imagination…to those of reality…
and does it with simplicity, with truth, and grandeur, is lord of Nature, and her powers;
and his mind is universal, and his art the master-art!”
Well, Hazlitt’s idea of transporting us
to the regions of the imagination especially resonates with me,
and the idea of the first integrity of things has enormous meaning I think right now.
They make, I believe, Poussin’s great picture
particularly important for this moment, that we're in.
And it's this moment that I wanted to recall
for you, missing this picture as I do, by not being able to visit The Metropolitan (Museum).
We all look forward to its opening.
I want to thank you for joining me.
And I look forward to seeing you in the Museum.
Meanwhile, stay well.