Selected Essays of John Berger by John Berger Page A

interested in a child god being suckled by a goat, in bees that made special honey for him and in Cretan nymphs? Hardly. Was even Poussin as interested as is often thought? A nymph, the Virgin Mary, a spectator of David’s triumph over Goliath – each has the same face. So why are we moved? By the purely formal design? If that were so, we would be moved in the same way by, say, a Byzantine mosaic. Clearly we are not. No. In fact, it is here that we come to the first discovery: that in Poussin – and actually, though less obviously, in all art which survives its period – there is something between form and content arbitrarily divided: there is the way of looking at the world, the artist’s method of selection, which the work in its entirety expresses and which is more profound than either its subject matter or its formal organization.
    Poussin offers us the world as an impossibly honest trader. Everything on show is declared and defined without the slightest ambiguity. One can see on what every foot stands, what every finger touches. Compare his large tree with the trees in Claude next door. Claude’s are far truer to the confusion of appearances as they normally strike us. In the Poussin the leaves are as defined as those of a book. Yet this clarity is not a question of fussy accuracy. On the contrary Poussin painted broadly and simply – the surface of his painted flesh like that of water running shallowly and imperceptibly over a perfectly smooth pebble. His clarity is the result of order. Nothing in his figure paintings (his late landscapes are different)has been snatched from chaos or temporarily rescued from mystery. The wind blows in the right direction to furl the striding nymph’s golden dress so that it becomes a precise extension and variation on her own movement. The reeds break, and point like arrows to the focal centre of the scene. The sitting nymph’s foot forms a perfect ten-toed fan with the foot of the child.
    Yet why, then, is the picture not completely artificial? For two reasons. First, because Poussin’s intensely sensuous vision of the human body forced him – as true sensuousness, as opposed to vicarious eroticism, must always do – to recognize the nature of physical human energy. His figures move with the same inevitability as water finds its own level, and consequently they transcend their rhetorical gestures. A man, after all, lifts his arm to stop a bus in the same way as he might wave to greet the spirit of a poet on Parnassus. And in this painting the kneeling foster-father could be wringing out a wet towel just as well as holding the head of the goat between his legs. Secondly, because the scene, given its arrangement, is still
visually
true. For example, the deep velvet blue of the sitting nymph’s robe, the pale aquamarine dress of the nymph on the rocks and then the sudden porcelain blue of the sky behind the hills – these blues, in a cereal-coloured landscape, clash, welcome, correspond and set up distances between themselves just as blues can do on Boat Race day.
    And so we think: this is not another world, nor is it even a stage fantasy. Here the aspect of a shoulder or a breast is like the voice of an actress delivering Racine’s words: we have seen and heard them in different situations. This is simply the world ordered beyond any previous imagining.
    Which brings us to the crux of the matter and the second discovery. Poussin’s sense of order added up to something more than an impeccable sense of composition – as we now use the term. Compare the studio works or the copies at Dulwich with the artist’s own works. On the canvas they are sometimes just as well arranged or composed. But only on the canvas. The shapes and colours and lines are ordered. But not the scene itself. In front of a Poussin one feels that he brought order to the slice of life he was painting before he even picked up a brush: that he posed his whole subject, as he might have posed a single model: