Nicolas Poussin's landscape allegories

by Sheila McTighe

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 as seen by a subsequent generation of critics and biographers. This study also 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. McTighe argues that Poussin's landscape allegories, despite their outward limpidity, are deliberately obfuscatory, their meaning ensconced in a set of signs and symbols recognizeable only to an intellectual milieu that was marginal in seventeenth-century cultural life.