On Nicolas Poussin | The Brooklyn Rail
Nicolas Poussin - Google Arts & Culture
Nicolas Poussin (The J. Paul Getty Museum Collection)
Nicolas Poussin | The Art Institute of Chicago
Nicolas Poussin (1594 - 1665) | National Gallery, London
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ckw3GAD130
[by the 17th Century] Art had been developed to such a point that artists were inevitably conscious of the choice of methods before them. And once we accept this, we are free to admire the way in which [Guido] Reni carried out his programme of beauty, how he deliberately discarded anything in nature that he considered low and ugly or unsuitable for his lofty ideas, and how his quest for forms more perfect and more ideal than reality was rewarded with success. It was Annibale Carracci, Reni and their followers who formulated the programme of idealizing, of ‘beautifying’ nature, according to the standards set by the classical statues. We call it the neo-classical or ‘academic’ programme as distinct from classical art, which is not bound up with any programme at all. The disputes over it are not likely to cease soon, but no one denies that among its champions have been great masters who gave us a glimpse of a world of purity and beauty without which we would be the poorer. The greatest of the ‘academic’ masters was the Frenchman Nicolas Poussin (1594—1665), who made Rome his adopted home town. Poussin studied the classical statues with passionate zeal, because he wanted their beauty to help him convey his vision of bygone lands of innocence and dignity.
