Nicolas PoussinFrankreich, 1594–1665Landscape with Saint John on Patmos
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Landscape with Saint John on Patmos (French: Paysage avec saint Jean à Patmos) is a 1640 neoclassical painting by Nicolas Poussin, now in the Art Institute of Chicago. The painting features Saint John, banished to Patmos, writing the Book of Revelation amidst a classical landscape background.
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Although French by birth and training, Nicolas Poussin spent most of his career in Rome, immersed in the study of ancient art, where he painted classically inspired works for an educated elite. His art has long been considered the embodiment of the ideals of seventeenth-century classicism. In this painting, Saint John, one of the four Evangelists who wrote the Gospels of the New Testament, reclines beside his attribute, the eagle. He is here depicted as a powerful old man, presumably after retiring to the Greek island of Patmos to write his gospel and the book of Revelation at the end of his life. To suggest the vanished glory of the ancient world, Poussin carefully constructed an idealized setting for the saint, complete with an obelisk, a temple, and column fragments.
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Man-made and natural forms were adjusted according to principles of geometry and logic to convey the measured order of the scene. Even the profile view of Saint John is in harmony with the classical landscape. This painting may have been part of a projected series on the four Evangelists—in addition to this work, Poussin completed a companion, Landscape with Saint Matthew (1640; Gemäldegalerie, Berlin).
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- 1930.500
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Im Leben von Nicolas Poussin
Das ganze Leben1630s
Cassiano dal Pozzo — his chief patron
Poussin’s flowering coincided with his complete abandonment of church commissions: he gathered a circle of patrons around him but strove for independence, accepting commissions from connoisseurs without binding himself to any of them permanently. The most important was Cassiano dal Pozzo; in the surviving correspondence the relationship comes close to servitude, although the painter did not live in his house.
1640
December 1640: Poussin returns to Paris
François Sublet de Noyers, Superintendent of the King’s Buildings, whose invitations Poussin had declined, sent his cousins Roland and Paul Fréart to Rome, offering the title of First Painter to the King and a substantial residence at the Tuileries. Poussin yielded, and in December 1640 he was back in Paris.
1641
An avalanche of royal commissions
In Paris he was swamped with commissions: “The Institution of the Eucharist” for the chapel of the château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, “The Miracle of St Francis Xavier” for the Jesuit novitiate, ceilings and vaults for the Grande Galerie of the Louvre, an allegory for Richelieu’s study, designs for tapestries and title pages for the royal printing house. For a man accustomed to working slowly and carefully it was too much.
1641–1665
Post: Premier peintre du Roi
autumn 1642
Finds a pretext and leaves for Rome for good
Increasingly unhappy with court intrigue and the weight of commissions, in the autumn of 1642, while the king and court were in Languedoc, Poussin found a pretext to leave Paris and returned to Rome permanently.
1642–1644
Richelieu, Louis XIII and Urban VIII pass away
Richelieu died in 1642, Louis XIII in 1643 and Pope Urban VIII in 1644; his successor Innocent X was less interested in art patronage and preferred Spanish culture, and the Barberini left for France. But Richelieu’s successor, Cardinal Mazarin, began to collect Poussin’s works.
