Dali House

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Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) isn’t the kind of painter who would normally grab my attention – too bucolic and lah-di-da for my taste – but intriguing things do keep popping up in his work, not least the claim that “The Shepherds of Arcadia” answers the riddle of the Holy Grail.

Like millions of others, I came across this ultimately enervating contention in “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail”. Co-author Henry Lincoln followed that up with “The Holy Place”, which I think Ron Howard and Tom Hanks are going to make into a movie. Poussin was rumoured to be a Grand Master of the Knights Templar. Even the word “rumour” doesn’t have as much weight as it used to, does it?

Now I’ve found out (probably after millions of others) that Poussin’s “Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake” has quite a story behind it too. The title’s pretty darned good on its own.

And the original title was “The Effects of Fear”, which is even better.

The back-story has been extrapolated upon at great length in a new book by the much-admired British art historian TJ Clark, “The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing”. I haven’t read it, but there’s an excellent review on the New Criterion website.

Clark wooed Poussin’s painting day after day for months, staring at it endlessly, writing it love poems, asking how its parents were doing, and it eventually put out for him, although the reviews I’ve seen are a little dubious about the offspring. Clark’s worship produced the book, a diary of daily musings, the “experimental” part being that he didn’t set out to be scholarly, just keep an unedited record of his speculations.

The fishermen’s poses mimic that of the running man, Clark notices, mundanely enough. Could the slain man be the murdered Abel, he wonders, and the bystanders Adam and Eve? Imagination may be playing tricks on him.

Here’s what Clark was fondling with his eyes and his imagination …

It’s a large painting, nearly six and a half feet by four, and there is much going on, but its central drama quickly becomes apparent.

There’s a figure engulfed in the coils of a huge snake in the foreground (largely in shadow), the title informing us that he’s dead or dying, and a man running away from the scene, terrified (from shadow to light).

The viewer’s realisation of what’s going on comes in waves. After the fleeing witness, another figure appears (this time well lit): a woman alarmed to see him running toward her in a panic.

Her reaction is in turn noticed by a fisherman (another spot of sunlight). Worried ourselves now, we begin searching elsewhere, to the hilltop villa, the town in the background, even the woods on the right, but find only the gloom of nature mocking man’s predicament.

But the chain of human events is frightening.

Washington’s National Gallery, where Clark spent his courtship with the painting, suggests the the setting might be a notorious snake-infested area near Fondi, southeast of Rome. I wonder if it’s still there, crawling with venomous or gut-squeezing peril?

New Criterion reviewer Michael J Lewis makes much of Clark’s political outspokenness in his first books in 1973, on Courbet and art and politics in mid-19th-century France. They were groundbreaking, Lewis says, because they replaced art in the socio-political context from which a century of academics had banned it.

Clark had the temerity to look at the artist’s social class and political affiliation, and thus uncovered a wealth of new insight into paintings that had been overlooked since the 19th century.

“The Sight of Death” worries Lewis because it’s so free of politics, odd, he thinks, since 1648 — the year Poussin painted “Snake” — marked the end of the Thirty Years War and the shocking execution of Charles I. Europe was in political and religious upheaval. But unless he was issuing a warning against contagious paranoia, Poussin here appears to have moved on, and so has Clark, at least in this “experimental” book.

Poussin, an intellect who painted with Titian’s sensuality, was at the height of his powers at this time. Here offers an otherwise idyllic landscape disrupted by murder of a sort, the rolling forests in dappled sunlight suddenly finding a grey corpse in their midst. Yet they’re not the least perturbed, Lewis points out. Other artists of the day “succumbed to the temptation to match their landscape to the anecdotal incident, so that any tumult in the foreground roiled the hills and the trees in the background”. Poussin’s nature is an implacable witness to the tragedy playing out before it.

Yet he’s packed the picture with allusion, that’s clear. Cain and Abel may be a stretch, but mankind is obviously in trouble here.

The fear of death gets a far more casual reading in “The Shepherds of Arcadia”, of which there are two versions, this one, more famous at the Louvre, painted eight years before “Snake”, but eight years after its original.

Poussin had first painted “Arcadia”, more sombre by far, in 1630, just after he’d been nursed back to health from a life-threatening illness by the family of a French pastry chef living, like the Norman artist was, in Rome. Poussin got better and promptly married the chef’s daughter, and got a lot more cheerful in his work.

Henry Lincoln had Christopher Cornford of the Royal College of Art analyse the work and, interestingly enough, Cornford found a pentagram as the basis for its composition. Poussin used geometry all the time setting up his composition, but five points were enough to persuade Lincoln that the environs of Rennes-le-Château in southern France also had a pentagonal foundation. The village is where Lincoln speculated the Holy Grail had been hidden by the Knights Templar.

It’s the inscription in “Shepherds” that keeps the curious coming back for more. “Et in Arcadia ego” – fundamentally meaning “And in Arcadia I am”, but more likely, it’s generally accepted, “Even in Arcadia I am present”, the first person being understood to mean Death.

Poussin is depicting the earthly paradise and illustrating Jacopo Sannazaro’s 1502 poem, drawn in turn from Virgil: “I will make your tomb famous among these rustic people. The shepherds will come from the hills of Tuscany and Liguria to adore this corner of the world only because you were here in the past.”

The figures are arranged symmetrically in poses and gestures mimicked by the trees behind them, and it’s been suggested that the three on the right align with the constellations Virgo, Bootes, The Shepherd (complete with a foot resting on a stone) and Hercules. The man on the left may be Serpens, the constellation of Serpentarius, or a corresponding mythological figure, Asclepius, the god of medicine.

Asclepius, who was given immortality only after angering the gods with his magical ability to raise the dead, gives Poussin’s painting an alchemical pretext, and from this Lincoln and Dan Brown and so many others lifted the fingerprint of the fabled Priory of Sion.

In fact all these gods in sherpherd’s guise were once mortals. They’ve reassembled here on earth to ponder life’s tenuous grasp.

Virgo stands for justice, the harvest and the mother of Jesus, and she was linked to Bootes, aka Icarius, the winemaker trained by Dionysos who was slain by a drunken mob. Erigone, his daughter, found his tomb and hung herself in grief, and Zeus transferred them to the night sky as Virgo and Bootes.

Hercules, with customarily outstretched hand, points to the letter R in Arcadia, or perhaps the syllable “arc”, which would correspond with Arcturus, the Ox Guard, the principal star in the constellation Bootes (and Bootes herded bears, not sheep). Lincoln manages to make much more of the “arc” facet.

Philip Coppens, who pokes at old riddles professionally, has an engaging essay on the Web in which he notes that one Priory of Sion researcher found a letter dating to about 1656 from Louis Fouquet to his brother Nicolas, who was an aide to King Louis XIV. Louis wrote that he had met Poussin in Rome and the painter had some crucial information for the monarch.

A decade later Nicolas Fouquet fell from royal grace and the king allegedly scoured his former aide’s personal belongings. Found guilty of fraud, Fouquet spent the rest of his life in extremely solitary confinement. Did this have anything to do with Poussin’s secret? The next Dan Brown bestseller is awaited, but I won’t say “breathlessly”.

From the bucolic south of France we’re off to the tourist-friendly Shugborough estate in Staffordshire, England, where Eileen Harris reported in May for Apollo magazine on an effort to “crack the Poussin Code” hidden in a monument erected by the Anson family, Earls of Lichfield, whose seat this was. The old farm’s now dreadfully commercial, like so many other fine English country houses.

The Shepherd’s Monument was commissioned by Thomas Anson in 1748, a marble tablet 20 feet high with a likeness of Poussin’s painting. Beneath it is an inscription added by Thomas, two lines with ten letters separated by dots that seem to suggest incomplete words. The code “has foxed generations of people from Darwin to Dickens”, the Shugborough website says.

It seems to say:

O. U. O. S. V. A. V. V.
D.                   M.

I see two V’s together and all I can think of is Vivian Vance, but I don’t think television had yet been invented back then, let alone “I Love Lucy”. How about “veni ad vidi vici“? That’s my Latin exhausted.

They got some of the famous World War II code-breakers of Bletchley Park to try and decipher the inscription. Here they are with one of those ancient yet formerly formidable enema machines they used to beat the Hun. No, sorry, it was called the enigma machine. Anyway, this picture was taken two years ago, and they’ve got nowhere since. I’m guessing the machine doesn’t understand Templar and this war is lost. Nor has any visitor to the Shugborough website met the challenge.

Eileen Harris points out that in 1971 she had attributed the rustic arch over the monument to the eccentric astronomer-architect Thomas Wright, the storied”Wizard of Durham”, but even Wright’s dalliance with the Golden Section and other esoterica offers no clues, she says.

The best she can offer is the suggestion that the monument was erected as a tribute to Henry Pelham, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer when he died “unexpectedly” in 1754 on the eve of an election, and a good pal of Thomas Anson and his brother, Admiral George, the circumnavigator and First Lord of the Admiralty.

You can’t see the monument in this Google Earth satellite image, but it’s down in the bushes in the left foreground near the China House, Doric Temple, Great Yew Trees and the Cats Monument. Yes, cats. Quite a place.