Poussin: Metabolising Horror
Only he sees the horror, the dead amalgam of himself crawled over by a snake. The horror of disillusion, corruption and death. No one else sees it.
He turns to it horrified, transfixed. The moment the vision penetrates him is captured here as simultaneously his body rotates away to escape and run. The torque of his body is a clockwise rotation led by the leading left hand reaching out and the trailing arm reaching back balancing, almost clutching at the bank.
Poussin then mirrors that clockwise rotational torque immediately above and behind the man, in the twisting rotating trunks of the trees and then also in the fishing boat. His leading arm links up to a sailor who is stabilising what would also otherwise be the clockwise torque of the boat out into the lake, bringing it back anti-clockwise. This sailor leaning muscularly on a pole to do this but also looking up, having noticed him, a concerned but slightly distance glance.
And then the forward motion of the man to the left - as his leading leg catching the morning light takes the forward motion from the push off of the trailing leg – is stabilised by the fishermen at the back of the boat, self-absorbed in his task, looking ahead, pulling the boat back in the other direction, to the right, towards the shore. A still centre in the painting.
In this way in formal terms then, just above the man, there is a parallelogram/square – joining the man’s forward arm, his head and face, the leaning fisherman and the absorbed rower.
Then following that, linking beyond the rower upwards through the trees, to the lit landscape of the town bathed in the distance, lit in the morning light, leading the eye off further back into the mountain glow in the distance, bathed in the most intense dawn sunlight and the focal endpoint of gaze leading to a blue and cloudy sky.
This is one way in which the horror is metabolised.
Another - the woman on the path suddenly alert to, presumably, a cry, a commotion - looking with the most alert empathic sympathy towards the young man. The death scene is obscured directly to her but revealed as reflected in the young man’s face and body.
Plus the simultaineous instinctive movement of her body, balancing her seated posture, is that her hands fly out to the side, following the line of the shore horizon – and in doing so embrace (in formal pictorial terms) the death scene that she can’t see but must intuit. The location and direction of the embrace of her arms in the painting is an embrace of the death scene.
She acts as a pivot this woman, a pivot around which the dawn turns and the man’s cry is managed. To her right a bundle of clothes topped with a gold fabric glistening in the morning light, gorgeous, complementing and echoing the pale early light on the dead man’s tunic, revealed to us but not to her. And then further to her right behind her a shadowy group of figures still in the dark, one of whom lazily turns vaguely towards something of interest happening to his left, a lazy commotion.
Thus, the painter registers the moment of the man registering the horror. There are three eyes too on him in different ways - the woman’s alert acute sympathy, the fisherman’s concern, the shadowy boy’s vague interest.
What happens therefore in the painting is that the horror of nightmare and trauma, transfixing awfulness, is registered from the depths of the night - and as it were metabolised through a chain of human activity and life. The man is repelled, the woman is engaged in empathy, the fisherman leans on his poll concerned and the rower at the back of the boat is absorbed in his task.
And behind them the polis of the city, of every day communion, the bathers early morning in the lake, someone on a horse, some walkers, some watchers, some ordinary conversation, leading out and beyond then into the movement of nature…. a rotation of the earth as it would be anticlockwise as we watch the picture - bending towards the rising sun.
So, in the painting formally we have the clockwise torque from horror, an anticlockwise stabilisation, an embrace, a movement up and backwards as the zigzag of light climbs into the dawn. How human society metabolises trauma and death through itself.
Formally the painting works in sections of interdigitating light and dark as it ascends the canvas – everything held and balanced in the moment and yet in dynamic tension and flow: the flow and management of traumatic impact.
And a dead man – a momento mori, a deathly reflection for the young man of later life.
And one can understand a family drama too here…..of the young man with a primary trauma, a mother’s solicitude, an older brother’s concern, and the father’s distant self-absorbed engagement that teaches endurance and everyday work in the stoic fashion.
Jonathan Green
October 3rd 2021
Acknowledgement: The stimulus to really look at this painting much more than I had done previously came from TJ Clarke’s wonderful book The Sight of Death, an innovative and extraordinary account of his extended interaction with the same work. My own response was personal and I think different in detail to his, but this short piece of writing is completely indebted to the wonderful vision in that book.