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And the space of these landscapes is indeed stage-like, as Blunt implies when he observes that Poussin's landscapes are based on a "finite space," rather than the "infinite space" of his friend Claude Lorrain's paintings, with their misty oceans and sunset skies. The fascination of Poussin's landscapes is in the infinite subdivisions of this finite space, in the way forms fit within forms. Poussin's protagonists are actors on a stage; the woman bending down to gather Phocion's ashes becomes a consciousness within the consciousness of the painting, her arched back set in a counterpoint with the upright frontality of temples and the great spreading power of the trees. Poussin's genius for incident and interval, for visual relationships that are spontaneous yet exact, is something to behold. Very few artists have this gift: in the French tradition after Poussin, you find it only in Watteau, Chardin, Corot, and Braque.
The razor-sharp lucidity of the landscapes of the late 1640s, which suggests a middle-aged man's supreme confidence, gave way in the fifteen years leading up to Poussin's death in 1665 to a very different quality: a thickening of the surface, a shivering stasis. This more overt painterly touch was precipitated by physical infirmity. Poussin developed a tremor in his hands that left him no longer able to give his forms the exactitude of the Ashes of Phocion and the Orpheus and Eurydice. But when facility abandoned him, he found a new unity in the blurring of details--in the necessity of conceiving figures and landscape elements in a bulkier and more compact way. There is a deliberateness that is not without its own surprising delicacy in Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun, The Infant Bacchus Entrusted to the Nymphs of Nysa, and the Four Seasons, of which two, Spring and Summer, have made the trip from Paris to New York. In these late works, the rectangle of the canvas frames not a single moment, not a Now, but something closer to an eternity, a Forever. What counts here is not narrative immediacy but the timeless lessons to be drawn from the narrative--about good and evil, the lineage of Christ, Bacchic fertility.
