Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Nicolas Poussin's Theater of the World

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 77; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00233600802231502

1651-2294

David Carrier,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements Thanks are due to Malcolm Bull and Marianne Novy for critical comments; to Charles Burroughs and Timothy J. Standring for essential references; and to Margaretha Lagerlöf for generous encouragement. Notes 1. Quoted in Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, Phaidon, London, 1967, p. 242. 2. Mario Rosa, »‘The world's theatre’: the court of Rome and politics in the first half of the seventeenth century«, in Court and Politics in Papal Rome, 1492–1700, eds Gianvitorio Signorotto and Maria Antonietta Visceglia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 78–79. Larry F. Norman, The Theatrical Baroque, exhibition catalogue, David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, 2001, quotation 1: »The period art historians call the baroque was the age of theater.« 3. Laurie Nussdorfer, »The Politics of Space in early Modern Rome«, in Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 42, 1997, p. 161. See also her Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1992. 4. Charles Burroughs, From Signs to Design: Environmental Process and Reform in Early Renaissance Rome, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, MIT Press, 1990, p. 19. 5. Nussdorfer, »The Politics«, pp. 183–184. 6. Quoted in Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1993, p. 247. Although this study of patronage does not discuss visual art, it has much information relevant for our analysis. 7. Richard Krautheimer, The Rome of Alexander VII, 1655–1667, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1985, p. 114. A critique of his account appears in Dorothy Metzger Habel, The Urban Development of Rome in the Age of Alexander VII, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002. I have learned from the sweeping history found in Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: the growth of a new tradition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1963, which in the analysis of Rome focuses on the role of Sixtus V. 8. Krautheimer, The Rome of Alexander VII, p. 125. 9. Krautheimer, The Rome of Alexander VII, p. 146. On Roman architecture and politics see also Evonne Anita Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2004, and Paolo Prodi, The Papal Prince: One Body and Two Souls: The Papal Monarchy in Early Modern Europe, trans. Susan Haskins, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, Ch. 3. 10. Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450–1650, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1984, p. 40. 11. See my »Two Societies of the Spectacle: On Nicolas Poussin«, forthcoming. 12. Krautheimer, The Rome of Alexander VII, p. 138. 13. Krautheimer, The Rome of Alexander VII, p. 142. 14. The fullest record is Maurizio Fagiolo Dell'Arco and Silvia Carandini, L'effimero Barocco: Strutture della festa nella Roma del ‘600, Bulzoni Editore, Roma, Bulzoni Editore, 1977. 15. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollinger Foundation, New York, Bollinger Foundation, 1953, p. 139. 16. Frances A. Yates, Theatre of the World, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1969, p. 189. Although focused on stage designer who worked in Venice and Paris, Per Bjarström, Giacomo Torelli and Baroque Stage Design, National Museum, Stockholm, 1962, has much information relevant to our analysis. 17. See Irving Lavin, »Bernini and the Theater«, in Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, Oxford University Press, New York and London, 1980, pp. 146–157, quotation 155. See also his »On the Unity of the Arts and the Early Baroque Opera House«, in »All the world's a stage . . . »: Art and Pageantry in the Renaissance and Baroque, eds Barbara Wisch and Susan Scott Munshower, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 1990, Vol. 2, Ch. 14. 18. Timothy K. Kitao, Circle and Oval in the Square of Saint Peter's: Bernini's Art of Planning, New York University Press, New York, 1974, p. 26. 19. Leo Steinberg, »Observations in the Cerasi Chapel«, Art Bulletin, 49, 1959, pp. 183, 189, 190. 20. Josh Ellenbogen, »Representational Theory and the Staging of Social Performance«, in Norman, The Theatrical Baroque, p. 22. 21. Norman M. Klein, The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects, New Press, New York, 2004 connects baroque and modern concerns with theatricality. 22. See my »Remembering the Past: Art Museums as Memory Theaters«, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 61(1), Winter 2003, pp. 61–65. 23. Nussdorfer, »The Politics«, p. 161. 24. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, Vintage, New York, 1978, pp. 34–35. 25. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Doubleday Anchor Books, Garden City, NY, 1959, p. 17. See also Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior, Pantheon, New York, Pantheon, 1967. 26. See my Artwriting, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1987, pp. 125–127, which discusses the classic account of role playing, Denis Diderot's Rameau's Nephew. 27. This paragraph draws on Lavin, »Bernini and the Theater«, with quotations from pp. 150, 154–155. 28. Ch. Jouanny, Correspondance de Nicolas Poussin, F. de Nobele, Paris, 1968, translated and commented on in Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, p. 169. See also the introduction to my Nicolas Poussin: Lettere sull'arte, Hestia edizione, 1995. On Poussin's politics see also my »Two Representations of Masaniello's 1647 Revolt in Contemporary Neapolitan Paintings«, Source, XXVII (1), Fall 2007, pp. 32–38. 29. Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, Phaidon, London, 1967, p. 169, emphasis added. 30. Two scholars have linked Poussin's paintings to theater, in very different ways: see Margaretha Lagerlöf, Ideal landscape: Annigale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1990, Ch. 4 »A Stage for Life and Action«, and also her »The crossroads of art: the subjective, the performative, and the aesthetic. Featuring Poussin's Eliezer and Rebecca at the well, 1648, » Word & Image 18 (4), October–December 2002, pp. 357–371; and Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin, trans. Catherine Porter, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1999, Ch. 2. 31. Rudolf Wittkower, Bernini: The Sculptor of the Roman Baroque, Phaidon, London, 1997, pp. 158, 159. 32. See Oskar Bätschmann, Nicolas Poussin: Dialectics of Painting, Reaktion Books, London, 1990, pp. 27–29. He describes three versions of this device, one with »a small hole for the observer's eye … provided, ‘to view the whole tableau from a distance’», p. 28). See also his »Three problems of the relationship between scenography, theatre and some works by Nicolas Poussin«, in La scenografi barocca, ed. Antonie Schnapper, Bologna, Editrice Clueb, Bologna, 1979, pp. 169–76. 33. Michael Fried, »An Introduction to my Art Criticism«, in his Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1998, p. 48. 34. He discusses how »Poussin's intensely absorptive Testament d'Eudamidas« was understood in the 1760s; Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1980, p. 108. His more recent account of Caravaggio, »Thoughts on Caravaggio«, Critical Inquiry 24 (1), 1997, pp. 13–56) moves in a different direction. 35. See my Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: from Formalism to beyond Postmodernism, Greenwood/Praeger, Westport, CT, 2002, Ch. 5. 36. Fried, Art and Objecthood, p. 167. 37. Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy 1600 to 1750, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1973, p. 161. 38. Many recent commentators, including Fried himself, have qualified, questioned and often rejected his influential analysis. 39. Some modernist theater performances do play to the spectators, acknowledging their presence, giving them roles in the unfolding drama. 40. Fagiolo Dell'Arco and Carandini, L'effimero Barocco, I, pp. 134–136; I, 185–193; II, 220. 41. Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, p. 131. 42. Fried, »An Introduction to my Art Criticism«, p. 50. 43. Fried, »An Introduction to my Art Criticism«, p. 51. He offers a complicated explanation for this dilemma, suggesting that around 1960, maybe, the nature of art changed. 44. Bernini did admire Poussin; see my Poussin's Paintings: A Study in Art-Historical Methodology, University Park and London, 1993, pp. 228–230. 45. Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, p. 85. 46. Normally the man playing Hamlet is not aware, like Hamlet, of seeing the audience. When some modernist playwrights have their actors recognize the spectators they play with reversing this well-entrenched convention. 47. Can interpreters escape this theatrical world, and say what they mean without regard to rhetorical concerns? Some scholars believe that this is possible. »We have to present our methods and results in such a way that our readers do not become objects of persuasion but participants in a shared intellectual discursive endeavor«. Oskar Bätschmann, »A Guide to Interpretation«, in Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History, eds Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 2003, p. 207. Personally, I am skeptical of the belief that interpretation can step outside the theater of the world. See my Principles of Art History Writing, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989. 48. Fried, Art and Objecthood, 168. 49. This essay supplements my Poussin's Paintings and my »Baroque Rhetoric: The Methodology«, to be published in the proceedings of »Performance/Performativity«, a conference held at the Swedish Academy, Rome, September 2006. It develops ideas, discussed on that occasion, which are worked out also in my »Towards a Structuralist Analysis of Baroque Art«, Source, XXVII(4), summer 2008, pp. 32–36.