Сатир и нимфа

c. 1618

The road to Rome ends in Florence

Poussin longed to go to Italy to study ancient and Renaissance art, but around 1618 he got only as far as Florence: Bellori speaks vaguely of some misfortune, while in fact money seems to have run out. That he saw the Quattrocento before Venice and Rome probably meant a great deal for his development.

1620s

The Cavaliere Marino takes the painter under his wing

Poussin’s work caught the attention of the Italian poet Cavaliere Marino, then living in France; his patronage let the thirty-year-old painter work in peace. According to Bellori the poet took him into his house and helped him with the invention of subjects and the rendering of emotion, and in Marino’s house Poussin gained access to a library with treatises by Alberti and Dürer and manuscripts and drawings by Leonardo.

1622

Six pictures for the Jesuits in just six days

A serious commission helped him pay his debts: the Jesuit college in Paris asked Poussin and other painters for six large paintings on the lives of Ignatius Loyola and the newly canonised Francis Xavier. According to Bellori the panels, in à la détrempe technique, were painted in only six days; they have not survived.

spring 1624

Spring 1624: Poussin arrives in Rome

According to Bellori Poussin settled in Rome in the spring of 1624 (other accounts say he first visited Venice); the lists of the church of San Lorenzo in Lucina name him from March 1624 among twenty-two people, mostly French artists, living in the house of Simon Vouet. He studied Raphael, while Caravaggio, whose literal materiality repelled him, he held to have come “to destroy painting”.

1630

Gives up monumental commissions

In 1630 the commission headed by Domenichino and d’Arpino gave the decoration of the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception in San Luigi dei Francesi to the Lorrainer Charles Mellin, not to Poussin. After that he firmly renounced the monumental genre and turned to “cabinet painting” for private patrons.

1630年8月9日

Married: Anne-Marie Dughet