Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape Allegories

Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape Allegories offers new interpretations for several of the artist’s most beautiful and enigmatic paintings of his late career. Examining the landscapes within the social and intellectual context of seventeenth-century libertinage, a clandestine atheist movement, Sheila McTighe also addresses the reception of these works, as ideally conceived by the artist, and by a subsequent generation of critics and biographers. This study, moreover, challenges the traditional view of Poussin’s work, inherited from academic criticism and more recent scholarship, as ‘classic,’ a term that implies its clarity and rationality. As McTighe argues, Poussin’s landscape allegories, despite their outward limpidity, are deliberately obfuscatory, their meaning ensconced in a set of signs and symbols recognisable only to an intellectual milieu that was marginal in seventeenth-century cultural life.

• New analysis of Poussin which sets him in the context of the history of ideas leading up to his work • Richly illustrated

1. Poussin’s storm landscapes and Libertinage in the mid-seventeenth century; 2. Poussin’s Landscape with Orpheus circa 1650: the politics of its reception; 3. Landscape as the site of allegory: Poussin and Roman studies of the hieroglyph; 4. Poussin’s classicism or Libertinage in representation; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

‘McTighe’s argument … is pursued with great erudition.’ Humphrey Wine, Apollo