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amused
One of my favourite artists is the French allegorical landscape painter Nicolas Poussin. A prolific artist, he tended to mix classical myth and allegory with real landscapes - either from his native France, or from the city where he spent much of his life, Rome.
Probably best known today for "The Shepherds of Arcadia", the "et in arcadio ego" painting at the heart of the Rennes-le-Chateau mysteries, his vast body of work focussed on the grand stuff of legend. Illustrating scenes with a clarity that we might today associate with the pre-Raphaelites, he gave us the stuff of myth framed in the world his patrons knew.
I spent 20 minutes this afternoon sat in front of one of his paintings, just breathing in the light and the shadow, the forms and the motion. Poussin may not be a painter that fits in with the 21st century zeitgeist, but he captured a orderly clarity that still catches the eye...
Probably best known today for "The Shepherds of Arcadia", the "et in arcadio ego" painting at the heart of the Rennes-le-Chateau mysteries, his vast body of work focussed on the grand stuff of legend. Illustrating scenes with a clarity that we might today associate with the pre-Raphaelites, he gave us the stuff of myth framed in the world his patrons knew.
I spent 20 minutes this afternoon sat in front of one of his paintings, just breathing in the light and the shadow, the forms and the motion. Poussin may not be a painter that fits in with the 21st century zeitgeist, but he captured a orderly clarity that still catches the eye...