Legacies of ‘Sublime Poussin’: Louis Marin’s plea for Poussin as a painter

This article looks at ways of engaging with Louis Marin's career-spanning work on Poussin, from his verbal-visual analysis of signs and description in Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake to his unfinished project devoted to the sublime and variation in selected landscapes and other works (‘Sublime Poussin’). Marin's essays on Poussin are widely read and taught, yet many discussions struggle to acknowledge both the complexity and specificity of his different theoretically-based readings of Poussin, on the one hand, and his pursuit of Poussin's pictorial practice, on the other. First, a key recent example of the reception of Marin's work on Poussin, T. J. Clark's The Sight of Death, is discussed, enabling us to underline Marin's distinctive contributions to interpretations of narrative space and time, which were quite separate, despite Clark's view, from any imposition of structuralist procedures on seventeenth-century painting. Secondly, the increasing interest on Marin's part in Poussin's practice, and in how to find a style and methodology to write about it, is explored through questions of reception and enigmatic expression in his essay on the 1647 Finding of Moses. Infamously linked to this painting is the unloved Ordination from the second series of Sacraments, which is examined in relation to Marin's early semiological enquiries and his later interest in voice and gesture. Finally, the article considers how variation is proposed by Marin as a way to explore the relation between human figures, stories, and the elements in the Four Seasons.