Poussin's reflection

Jonathan Unglaub

No two artists have seemed as diametrically opposed in their expression of the representational purpose of painting as Michelangelo da Caravaggio and Nicolas Poussin (Figs. 1, 2). Each conceived of painting as a reflection, but understood in radically different terms. Caravaggio's Medusa exemplifies painting as mirror. Executed on canvas mounted on a wooden parade shield, it assumes the convex form of Perseus's polished shield. Its surface reflects the gruesome face of the decapitated Gorgon frozen in an instant of petrifying horror. Medusa's androgynous visage captures the artist's own expression studied in the mirror, slightly veiled through the mythological guise, and this is why it captivates us with such unmitigated force and immediacy. (1) Caravaggio, as we know from contemporary testimony, boasted that nature alone was his master. (2) Whatever the dramatic roles assigned to his figures, they retain the palpable presence of the model or, in some cases, the artist himself, as if reflections on a mirror. (3) Poussin, we are told, found such immediacy and naturalism anathema and allegedly said that Caravaggio "had come into the world to destroy painting." (4)

The condition of "reflection" seems to apply to Poussin's works only in the abstract philosophical sense, of a meditation on the illustrated subject, its larger theme, and his own art. (5) Even when he undertook a self-portrait, which demands verism and records the encounter of the artist and his reflection in a mirror, Poussin undermines the illusion of specular presence (Fig. 2). The rigid and formal image of the artist is a construction in which the representation of the concept of painting takes precedence over mirroring an individual resemblance. The painter's effigy forms the figural counterpart to the inscribed epitaph and the cast shadow, both of which preclude any misreading of the surface as that of a mirror. The grid of frames behind the artist transforms his re-created presence into an abstract conceit. As Elizabeth Cropper, Charles Dempsey, and others have shown, Poussin constructed the portrait as a rhetorical argument that imparts to the viewer his interpretation of the ideal of painting. Although the artist gazes out toward the beholder, initially his intimate friend Paul Freart de Chantelou, for whom he made the portrait, Poussin subordinated this perceptual confrontation to the allegory framed within one of the stacked canvases. Here a personification of Painting, crowned with the eye of perspective, is shown in profile extending an embrace toward the hands of friendship. In place of the visual axis that binds likeness and viewer, "I" and "you," that Medusa affirms and overwhelms as a simulacrum of the mirroring shield, Poussin reoriented the encounter of painter and friend across the lateral axis. This allegorical narrative, at right angles to the artist's gaze, reveals the true objective of painting: to extend the viewer's judgment through perspective and highly calibrated visual drama. (6) As many have observed, the Self-Portrait manifests the category of vision that Poussin termed the "prospect," or the intellectual viewing of a rationally constructed representation. This he opposed to the "aspect," or mere empirical seeing, which fails to differentiate between representation and reality--precisely the distinction that Medusa, as a painted reflection, collapses. (7)

Contemporary testimony, the criticism of Louis Marin and others, not to mention the oeuvres themselves, all reinforce the Caravaggio / Poussin dialectic. (8) Yet, as hitherto unobserved, one of Poussin's works contains a reflection that rivals the illusionistic presence of Caravaggio's mirroring shield and even takes shape on polished armor. Unlike Caravaggio's face, which evokes an immediate frisson of recognition, Poussin's reflection is camouflaged and emerges only from close looking. Once detected, the most literal and painterly of reflections signals a deeply pensive analysis of art, life, and the depicted literary episode. Tancred and Erminia in the State Heritage Museum (Fig. 9), St. Petersburg, often praised as Poussin's most enchanting work, is also his most "reflective," in every sense of the term: in its physical mirroring, poetic exegesis, and self-searching.

Before proceeding to this particular painting, we must examine the extent to which reflections pervade Poussin's works and form a crucial element of their aesthetic brilliance. One device of visual enrichment that Poussin often employed was the reflective surface. In a number of his mature landscapes such as Orpheus and Eurydice, Pyramus and Thisbe, Man Killed by a Snake, and Landscape with a Calm (Fig. 3), as well as scenes of the exposure and recovery of the infant Moses and numerous variations on the Holy Family, the artist included a placid aquatic surface that mirrors the surrounding figures, trees, hills, and clouds. In some instances, the physical reflections correspond with thematic or metaphoric mirroring among paired paintings. Elizabeth Cropper has shown that two of the most ambitious Holy Family compositions, those in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, form conceptual pendants to his two versions of Achilles on Skyros, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (Fig. 4). The reflective waters and vessels in the Holy Family compositions, apart from symbolizing the Virgin's purity, correlate to the mirroring surfaces that reveal the identity of Achilles to his companions. In each case, the child of divine parentage, Christ or Achilles, assumes a deceptive disguise, whether that of a fully human child or a young maiden, to confound, in the former's case, Satan or, in the latter's, the Greeks, who desire to enlist the powerful youth in the war against Troy. In each Achilles picture, Poussin elected not to depict the literal means of the warrior's self-revelation and embrace of his fate as recorded in Statius's Achilleid. In the text, Ulysses, posing as a merchant hawking treasures to the maidens, shrewdly offers a polished shield to Achilles, who sees reflected therein the shameful sight of his feminine attire. In the later Achilles version of 1656, the warrior stares instead into a maiden's hand mirror, turned away from the beholder. (9) Poussin seems reluctant to present an actual mirroring surface as a vehicle of judgment and self-knowledge. Yet in several earlier paintings, generally made before 1635, the reflective surfaces of armor are conspicuous and revelatory.

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In the early Mars and Venus, we observe, as in many of the later works, the still pond reflecting its surroundings (Fig. 22). It glimmers with the image of the adjacent water nymph in steep foreshortening. Here, as in several of Poussin's earlier works, burnished armor provides a vehicle for more painterly reflections. This appears especially in his scenes illustrating Torquato Tasso's epic poem Gerusalemme liberata, where the removal of arms constitutes a central component of the narrative. In Rinaldo and Armida, the knight's cuirass and the discarded shield and helmet display a virtuosic application of gold, brown, and white pigment (Fig. 5). This forms a striking demonstration of that paradox of oil painting whereby the thickest impasto captures the most fleeting highlights. The beautifully rendered antique cuirasses and helmets of Carlo and Ubaldo in The Companions of Rinaldo mirror the crepuscular setting through a subtle interweaving of white, silver, gold, and pink brushstrokes (Fig. 6). In the Abduction of Rinaldo, the reflections in the shield take on a literary function as well (Fig. 7). The way its surface mirrors the leonine visor of Rinaldo's helmet foreshadows how the warrior's companions, coming to rescue him from Armida's embrace, hold up a reflective shield to reveal his depraved state and arouse his natural bellicosity. This shield obliquely demonstrates the mirroring self-revelation that Poussin later refused to portray explicitly in Achilles on Skyros, the episode that inspired Tasso's characterization of Rinaldo.

Tancred and Erminia in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham (Fig. 8), exhibits similar sharp, steely reflections. Here, Erminia and Vafrino have come across the unconscious Christian knight Tancred, who has just killed the Saracen champion Argante in single combat. Long secretly enamored of Tancred, Erminia, thinking him dead, utters a desperate lament. Her tears awaken the knight, and Vafrino, his page, props him up. Erminia, expert in the medicinal arts, but lacking supplies, severs her tresses to bind her beloved's wounds. While Tasso does not specify how Erminia accomplishes this, Poussin has her wield Tancred's sword. Within its mirroring surface can be seen a tour de force distortion of her pale hand, golden lock, and blue gown. The burnished shield reflects Tancred's helmet in steep foreshortening and captures the light source in front of the pictorial surface, as does the silvery sheen of Vafrino's armor.

Poussin's earlier version of the Tancred and Erminia episode, in the Hermitage, ranks as his most dazzling exercise in the rendering of armorial reflections (Fig. 9). In no other work does the artist offer a more evocative twilight setting, tinged with all the romance and yearning of Erminia's lament. The highlights dance across the metallic surfaces with preternatural intensity. The raised sword that Erminia holds, reflecting her hand, costume, and an external light source, slices through the amber clouds like a bolt of lightning. In the distance, the glistening armor of the slain Argante dissolves into a rapid configuration of gleaming brushstrokes, much as Tasso had elsewhere described a fallen warrior, glowing in the starlight, as illuminated through "a golden stroke of the brush [aureo tratto di pennel]." (10) The highly polished shields bracketing the reviving knight reflect an external light, while the one in the foreground also mirrors Vafrino's bent leg. But the most striking rendition of a metallic surface in the picture, and perhaps in Poussin's entire oeuvre, is Vafrino's suit of armor. While much of the helmet and visor is cast in shadow, a streak of vermilion reflects the crowning plume. Next to this, brilliant dashes of white and silver impasto capture the unseen light source, as do the lustrous segments of the epauliere. Elsewhere, the shining armor suggests that something rather more startling than a vague source of illumination exists beyond the picture plane.

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At first glance, the flank of Vafrino's cuirass appears to reflect the ocher hue of his tunic's sleeve. On closer inspection, however, the grays, browns, and yellows of the painted surface coalesce into an altogether unexpected apparition (Fig. 10). Counting up from the waist, at the lower edge of the third and fourth segments of the cuirass, a pair of eyes emerges. With glimmering highlights in the pupils, the gaze is intent, almost hypnotic. Around this, the rest of a face takes shape. Closer to the sleeve, a nostril appears in the third segment, its upper edge delineating the slope of the nose seen in three-quarter view. As the yellow tones fill out the flesh of the face, amorphous brown passages above and below become a dense head of hair, a beard, and a mustache. A concentration of pigment in the first segment culminating in a diagonal stroke of a lighter flesh tone may represent an ear, somewhat distorted by the convex surface of the armor, or, more plausibly, the knuckles of a first pressed against the right cheek, reversing the famous gesture in Albrecht Durer's Melancholia I (Fig. 11).

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My contemplation of Tancred and Erminia, whether the original or numerous reproductions, has long been innocent. Only during the picture's recent exhibition at the Hermitage Rooms at Somerset House, London, did I finally realize that someone had been staring back at me all the while. (11) Once the bearded, glaring countenance has registered, its presence is irrepressible. As far as I know, the face reflected in Vafrino's armor has not been previously recorded. Given the boldness of the motif, it seems likely that someone, whether a casual viewer or an expert, must have observed it at some point, doubtless in Russia, where the painting has been housed for over two centuries. Remarkably enough, though, it is not mentioned in the Western scholarship on the artist. (12) This oversight results not from negligence on the part of scholars but from the simple fact that this type of virtuoso visual trick is alien to our lofty conception of Poussin as a classicizing, intellectual painter. The perspectival stage set and the classical relief have always been the most apt metaphors for the surfaces of Poussin's pictures, not a mirroring reflection. This accords, after all, with the artist's own distinction between aspect and prospect. We now have to acknowledge that Poussin, at least in this instance, engaged in the type of trompe I'oeil illusionism so characteristic of the traditions of realist painting, of pure naturalism, that the artist had always been held to disavow.

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However shocking the concealed face may seem, the fact that it materializes within a lustrous surface corresponds to an aspect of naturalism that had always intrigued Poussin: the rendition of light. The artist's fascination with the depiction of reflections is consistent with his larger interest in the optical effects of painting throughout the 1630s. We know that Poussin studied the manuscripts of Matteo Zaccolini, which address the importance of chiaroscuro in the construction of cubic form and space. The artist also benefited from unprecedented access to Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on Painting, the Codex Urbinas, which had been entrusted to his patron, Cassiano dal Pozzo, to prepare for publication. Poussin himself eventually produced illustrations for the first edition, which finally appeared decades later. As Cropper and Dempsey have shown, Poussin studied Leonardo and Zaccolini to perfect a scientific chiaroscuro, a distribution of both artificial and natural light and shadows, evident in paintings such as the Eucharist for Cassiano dal Pozzo. (13) This endeavor opposed the tenebrism of Caravaggio, which captured the contrived studio setup of models spotlighted from a skylight in a darkened room. Tancred and Erminia is one of Poussin's most striking exercises in the contrast of dense shadow and the incandescent illumination of a variety of surfaces. The gleaming highlights and, especially, the reflection on Vafrino's armor manifest both Leonardo's precepts on light and his case for painting as the supreme art. In the first part of the treatise, Leonardo sets up the paragone, or rivalry among the representational capacities of poetry, painting, and sculpture. The ability to capture the fleeting appearance of light and reflections numbers among the painter's unique prerogatives. Sculptors, by contrast, "cannot figure transparent bodies, nor can they figure luminous things, nor reflected lines, nor lucid bodies like mirrors and similar lustrous things." (14)

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In the wake of Leonardo, describing the strategic placement of reflections, whether in armor, in water, or through mirrors, as a means to expand the representational purview of a painting had become a topos in paragone literature. To cite one example, Giorgio Vasari records a male nude by Giorgione in which the artist turned the figure's back to the viewer, showing its front reflected in a pool, its right flank in a mirror, and its left profile in a burnished metal cuirass. Presenting all points of view simultaneously, the painting surpassed sculpture, which requires the beholder to walk around the figure to perceive the same multitude of angles. (15) Paolo Pino similarly recounts that Giorgione depicted a Saint George in armor in which a fountain presents his foreshortened reflection, while strategically placed mirrors provide other points of view. (16) Perhaps Girolamo Savoldo's Portrait of Gaston de Foix (Self-Portrait?), with its pair of mirrors and polished armor reflecting three angles of the sitter, is the closest approximation of Giorgione's lost works (Fig. 12). In all likelihood, the young Poussin knew Savoldo's picture, then attributed to Giorgione and housed in the French royal collection at Fontainebleau. (17) There he also studied Ambroise Dubois's Baptism of Clorinda, which would become the compositional prototype for Tancred and Erminia, produced some years later after the artist's move to Rome. (18) Indeed, some of the reflections in Poussin's painting, such as Vafrino's leg in the foreground shield and Erminia's finger and sleeve in her sword, offer fragmentary glimpses of different points of view, like the arm and pointed hand reflected in Gaston de Foix's cuirass. The face in Vafrino's armor, however, is a reflection of a different order, encompassing far more than sculpture's multiple views. It captures someone beyond the realm of representation, a witness in front of the picture. Likewise, the depicted mirrors in the Savoldo work imply that their notional counterpart, the surface of the painting, presents not the likeness of the French count but the reflection of the artist himself. (19)

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The modern interpretation of Savoldo's Gaston de Foix as a self-portrait inevitably broaches the question of what, or who, we see reflected in Vafrino's cuirass. Before specifically addressing whether we encounter a literal self-portrait here, we must situate Poussin's Tancred and Erminia within the tradition of self-reflexive imagery so crucial to exposing the parameters of representation in the early modern era. (20) Ever since Leon Battista Alberti's assertion in De pictura that Narcissus invented painting when he gazed at the mirroring pool, the notion of the painted surface reflecting back its maker, a witness, or the process of its production has fascinated artists. (21) The simple metaphor of painting as mirror, of course, provides the ultimate justification for the trompe l'oeil naturalism exemplified, in Poussin's time, by Caravaggio. By contrast, the actual depiction of mirrors or reflective surfaces within a composition or enframing it often exposes the constructed artifice of the image. They self-consciously index an extrinsic reality that the viewer identifies as his own empirical realm, whether the reflection affirms or occludes his presence (or the assumption of that of the artist). In ontological terms, the apparition on Vafrino's armor does not correlate to anything else within the confines of the image. Its appearance within a painted reflection incorporates, however fragmentarily, the empirical realm into the depicted realm. This ambiguity relates to those canonical examples, Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding and Diego Velazquez's later Las meninas, in which a depicted reflection, a mounted mirror, extends the represented space into the beholder's realm and positions witnesses in our midst (van Eyck and a companion or Philip IV and Queen Marianna). (22) Needless to say, Poussin's reflection hardly projects such an elaborate mise-en-scene, since Tancred and Erminia is an invented narrative with no pretense of portraying an actual event (such as a bourgeois betrothal or a portraitist working at court). Nonetheless, the reflected face injects an extrinsic presence into an otherwise self-enclosed narrative scene. This rupture, once detected, affirms the subjective position of painter and beholder alike.

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Poussin's use of mirroring armor to encompass something beyond the representation is self-conscious and finds its closest parallel in another work by van Eyck. As is well known, the convex surface of the shield strapped to the back of Saint George in van Eyck's Madonna of Canon van der Paele reflects a turbaned figure raising his right arm (Figs. 13, 14). This figure is usually interpreted as a self-portrait of van Eyck in the act of creating the very image before our eyes. Like the face on Vafrino's cuirass, the reflected image is camouflaged within the highlights of armor. Both artists thereby segregate the reflective motif from the primary narrative or religious representation. The latter remains self-sustaining, while the reflection indexes the self-referential axis of the image's genesis, which the viewer ultimately assumes. Although it is doubtful that Poussin could have known this private altarpiece in Bruges, he was certainly familiar with the classical pedigree for van Eyck's self-insertion within a suit of armor. Cicero, Plutarch, and Pliny record that Phidias included a sculpted portrait of himself in the shield of the Athena Parthenos. (23) Familiar with Savoldo's Gaston de Foix and perhaps other examples of reflections in northern painting, Poussin would have realized how this motif of self-projection could be achieved in the rendition of polished armor.

Returning to Poussin's time, a number of northern specialists in still life from the early seventeenth century, such as Clara Peeters and Pieter Claesz, revived van Eyck's self-reflective motif. Their works feature glass objects, such as spheres or goblet medallions, whose highlights reflect an image of the artist at work. The immaterial reflections suggest the fleeting moment the still life captures, in accordance with the other vanitas motifs present, but also boast the authorship of the miraculous illusion of forms and surfaces. (24) The reflection in Vafrino's polished armor, though far more assertive, lacks the professional attributes, such as the easel, that would clearly articulate the same kind of authorial propriety over the image. This does not mean, however, that the artist is not present in Tancred and Erminia.

Although the context of the northern still life would seem remote from Poussin's concerns, we must remember that Caravaggio first achieved fame as a virtuoso painter of natural objects. Many of his works feature astonishingly mimetic renditions of fruits, flora, and vessels, as in the Bacchus (Fig. 15). Furthermore, within the highlight on the glass carafe in the lower left of this work, Caravaggio included the same kind of minuscule reflection of the artist at his easel that later appeared in northern paintings. (25) The reflection confirms the assertion of Caravaggio's rival and biographer Giovanni Baglione that the artist, soon after he arrived in Rome, "made some portraits of himself in the mirror." (26) Bacchus, and the other single-figured genre paintings such as the Bacchino malato and Boy Bitten by a Lizard, are figurative self-portraits, or at the very least self-conscious presentations of the model as he appeared in the mirror. The carafe highlight epitomizes the specular circumstances through which all of these pictures came into being, as the image depicted on the surface "displaces," in Michael Fried's term, the reflection in the mirror, which the artist used to create it. Concurrently, as Fried has postulated, the "immersion" of the artist in the act of painting yields to the condition of spectatorship, as the image now engages the beholder, who occupies the position once held by the artist's gaze. The disposition and action of the arms and hands in these paintings, which for Fried index the wielding of a brush and palette, are crucial to establishing their bodily reflection of the painter immersed in his work. (27) In Poussin, the reflected face is isolated on a wedge of the cuirass, which itself is contained within a narrative scene of a different representational order. This precludes the kind of overall mirroring of the artist and/or studio production that can at least be theorized in Caravaggio's works. Nonetheless, the single clenched hand, pressed against the right cheek of the reflected face, unmistakably registers the presence of the artist creating the work. The gesture of melancholy signifies the artistic temperament, the contemplative, if not the physical, act that brought the painting into being. (28)

As a face reflected on the convex surface of a piece of armor, Poussin's image finds another antecedent in the very work to which his aesthetic has seemed most opposed: Caravaggio's Medusa. Among all of Caravaggio's self-reflexive images, none captures the elision from specularity to spectatorship more dynamically than the disembodied head of the Medusa. In one sense, the surface corresponds to the mirroring underside of Perseus's shield. The reflection casts the beholder as the Gorgon at the very instant her head is severed, as the process of autopetrifaction takes hold in her frozen expression and coagulated blood--what Louis Marin has termed the "sculptural moment." As Marin proposes, Medusa's gaze veers slightly down to her left (or her right in the reflection), to confront belatedly the notional position of Perseus, which the painter occupied as well. Adjacent to, but beyond, the scope of the representation, the sword delivering the decapitating blow becomes the painter's brush portraying its achieved objective. Moreover, the Medusa head reflects Caravaggio's features as he was painting, morphed into an expression of spontaneous and enduring horror, whose piercing gaze keeps the beholder spellbound. This immediacy also comes about through the painting's existence as an object, what Marin calls its "decorative moment." Perseus offered the severed head of Medusa as tribute to Athena, who affixed it to her shield to ward off--petrify--her enemies. Painted on an actual convex parade shield for the grand duke of Tuscany, Caravaggio's Medusa embodies this martial imperative. (29) Caravaggio has transformed the apotropaic Medusa head of Athena's shield into his own flesh and blood, which simultaneously and perpetually reenacts the instant of petrifaction. (30) The beholder's position fluctuates between the Gorgon herself and the adversaries of Athena and the duke, while always confronting the reflection of the artist in the mirror.

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Caravaggio's Medusa literalizes the prototype for all self-referential reflections: Phidias's self-portrait on the shield of the Athena Parthenos. There is an important distinction, however. Phidias portrayed himself not as the gorgoneion in the center of Athena's shield but as a figure participating in the Amazonomachy depicted around the perimeter, as a means to denounce his persecutors. (31) On the one hand, Caravaggio shows us how much more potent Phidias's self-defense against his enemies could have been. This mesmerizing power arises from Caravaggio's effacing all boundaries between mythological subject, self-reflection, and apotropaic object, each dimension collapsing into and consuming the other. Phidias, on the other hand, inserted his self-portrait within larger figurative contexts, both the battle of the gods and Amazons on the shield and the cult image of the militant goddess of wisdom and justice. Narrative and self-portraiture mutually coexist side by side. The self-reflexive portrait occasions a "reflection" on what the subject may signify for the artist. This is closer to what we see in Poussin. Although Poussin employs the illusionistic means of Caravaggio's glaring shield, in the form of a convex cuirass reflecting a face, Poussin's reflection, for all the intensity of its gaze, does not confront the spectator but, rather, turns its contemplative attitude into the adjacent narrative.

Does, then, the face reflected in Vafrino's cuirass record the projection of the artist onto the depicted surface of polished armor, in the tradition of Phidias, van Eyck, and Caravaggio? If so, then two urgent questions arise. First, is it Poussin himself we see? Second, and more fundamental, how do we, or can we, reconcile this illusionistic reflection with the artist's proverbial antipathy toward pure naturalism, exemplified above all in Caravaggio, the "destroyer" of painting? As we shall see, visual evidence plausibly supports that we see Poussin's reflected features, distorted perhaps by the convex surface. Furthermore, the pictorial tradition we have just surveyed compels us to address how the image embodies a literal or at least a figurative self-portrait. Yet recognizing the reflection for who it is, however atypical and extraordinary this may seem, can have implications beyond affirming Poussin's virtuosity, trompe l'oeil wit, and the specular act of creating. Does the portrait also manifest "reflection" in the abstract sense more readily associated with Poussin: "speculation" on the poetic significance of the subject he represents? Can the most literal of reflections not only, or even primarily, index the artist's immersion in crafting the illusion, in the manner of Caravaggio, but also embed the self in constructing the narrative, making it resonate subjectively?

Absent any documentation before 1766, scholars generally date Tancred and Erminia to about 1630-31, with which I concur. (32) We have a good idea of Poussin's appearance around this time. According to the elaborate inscription on the mount, the famous red-chalk portrait in the British Museum, London, purports to be a self-portrait of Poussin made in 1630 (Fig. 16). Poussin's authorship has recently been questioned, but there is no reason to doubt the identity of the sitter. (33) Though haggard, he shares the physiognomy of the extremely sober and dignified self-portraits Poussin painted for Jean Pointel and Chantelou two decades later (Fig. 2). Whereas the correspondences between the drawing and the reflected face are not as conclusive, they are not altogether implausible. Comparing the two images, we encounter the same scowl, with its furrowed brow and penetrating gaze, and a compression of features around a pronounced nose. The reflection, however, has a full beard and lacks the broad forehead of the drawing, though this may result from the distortion of the convex surface. The same basic similarities and differences apply when the reflection is compared to the portrait of about 1628 generally identified as the young Poussin and attributed to Gianlorenzo Bernini (Fig. 17). (34) Here the gaze is somewhat less intense, though the unshaven face suggests that at some point Poussin may have had a beard.

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Before accepting or rejecting the possibility that the reflection is a self-portrait, we should consider other interpretations. Does the motif somehow relate to Poussin's illustration of the scene from the Gerusalemme liberata? While the scowl might suggest the ferocity of the recently slain Argante, his restless spirit could only plausibly be reflected on the armor of his rival, Tancred, not that of Vafrino. Poussin's pictorial interpretations of the epic were extraordinarily inventive and responsive to Tasso's evocative poetic language, but the poet here offers nothing to suggest Argante's enduring spirit or ire. Furthermore, the face clearly engages something beyond the hermetic realm of the pictorial narrative. If it is not the artist himself captured in the reflection, then who--the patron? Unfortunately, we know nothing of the history of this work before 1766. Even if the reflection bore some resemblance to a portrait of one of Poussin's few known patrons from around 1630, this would be wanton speculation. Furthermore, there is no real precedent for acknowledging a patron pictorially in this way before Las meninas. An intimate friend or associate of the artist would seem a more plausible scenario. Poussin lived with the Flemish sculptor Francois Duquesnoy in 1626-27, with whom he pursued studies of Titian and the antique. Anthony Van Dyck's portrait of the sculptor from about this time shows him bearded, with a thick head of hair (Fig. 18). (35) Nonetheless, the expression of the reflected face more closely resembles the scowl of the British Museum portrait than the sculptor's aristocratic demeanor. (36)

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In the absence of another compelling explanation, we have to examine seriously the possibility of a self-portrait. The reflection allows Poussin's own subjective presence to haunt, surreptitiously, the narrative scene of Erminia healing Tancred. This can hardly be without significance. Here, besides being self-referential in the mirroring sense already explored, Poussin's reflection also subscribes to a related topos of the artist inserting himself into a narrative scene, what Victor Stoichita calls "contextual self-projection." While at times a self-portrait is given to a generic witness simply to create a visual signature--the counterpart to a donor portrait--there are many examples of artists participating in a narrative to apply a personal gloss to the subject. In such instances, the self-portrait can emerge with great ingenuity from the narrative scene, of which it is both a component and a commentary. (37) Often this insertion is self-reflective, in the confessional or defensive, rather than empirical, sense, as we have seen with Phidias's shield. Among artists of Poussin's time, Caravaggio employed this manner of self-insertion with the greatest frequency and audacity. Here, as well, the Poussin of 1630 may show a greater affinity with Caravaggio than he might later have wished to admit.

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Given the immediacy of all his models, it comes as no surprise that Caravaggio injects his literal presence into his works. In the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew and the Betrayal of Christ, Caravaggio appears as a witness among the surging melee of onlookers. (38) In one of his very last works, David with the Head of Goliath, his wonted self-reflective realism becomes a personal testament (Fig. 19). Here, the face of the Medusa has ripened and individualized into the rugged features of the mature artist, applied, once again, to a decapitated head, even more brutal in its physiognomic precision. Having wandered for five years as a fugitive from papal justice, the homicidal artist painted the David and Goliath for Cardinal Borghese, the patron who negotiated the pardon that would absolve him from the very fate here depicted. The decapitated self-portrait, however, is more than an act of penance intended for the patron; it is also a poetic topos to express the fatal wounds of love, whether or not the comely David, whose name means "beloved," actually portrays Caravaggio's reputed lover Francesco Buonieri. (39) The metaphor of the slaying, bondage, or defeat of the lover by the beloved frequently occasioned an artist to assume the role of the scorned partner. Caravaggio's motif was instantly seized by the Florentine painter Cristofano Allori, who portrayed himself as the decapitated Holofernes, held aloft by his mistress disguised as Judith. (40)

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As so often in his oeuvre, Caravaggio himself may have looked to his namesake Michelangelo to express his physical and amorous defeat. The bound prisoner in Michelangelo's Victory has likewise been interpreted as a portrait of the artist, while the triumphant youth displays the perfect physique of the sculptor's beloved Tommaso de' Cavalieri. Regardless of whether the sculpted images are literal portraits, Michelangelo's poetry figures their relationship through the imagery of a vanquished captive yielding to the blows of an armed cavalier ("cavalieri"). (41) Through David's display of the head, Caravaggio alludes even more directly to Michelangelo's equally morbid self-portrait as the flayed skin grasped by Saint Bartholomew in the Last Judgment (Fig. 20). In another poem, Michelangelo offers up himself, both to Cavalieri and to God, as a "dead hide." In each case, the artist depicts himself as a bodily fragment to appeal for redemption and absolution, whether legal, amorous, or divine. Furthermore, the skinned flesh inevitably broaches themes of artistic trial and ambition, mythologized through the fate of the satyr Marsyas, whom Apollo flayed alive for challenging his divine artistic supremacy in a contest. (42) As Avigdor Poseq has shown, the pose of Caravaggio's figure derives not only from Michelangelo but also from an ancient statue of Apollo displaying both the head and skin of Marsyas. (43) In his monumental The Flaying of Marsyas, Titian had earlier portrayed the gruesome outcome of the myth as a visual manifesto of his late bold impasto technique (Fig. 21). The artist cast himself as the brooding King Midas, the rash judge of the doomed contest, punished for awarding victory to the satyr. The irony is palpable, since despite the staging of defeat, the canvas is a vital skin of colored flesh, a mesh of interwoven brushstrokes--perhaps a riposte to Michelangelo's deflated hide among the corporeal paragons of disegno. (44) Titian's assumption of the melancholy pose expresses the association of personal reflection, physical anguish, and artistic achievement. In Caravaggio, Michelangelo, and Titian, the self-portraits signal the artistic identity of the maker as well as the biographical relevance of the depicted subject.

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In all of these examples of contextual self-projection the artist performs, assumes the role, of one of the actors in the depicted scene. What is remarkable, and perhaps unique, about a self-portrait in Tancred and Erminia is that Poussin plunges into the narrative not as a witness or protagonist but as an apparition, a virtual presence, mirrored back to the beholder alone. As such, Poussin's approach bears closest comparison to Michelangelo's, where the portrait is also camouflaged and isolated on an epidermal armor of sorts. The reflected self-portrait, although only virtually adjacent to the narrative, nonetheless directs its melancholy gaze to the very heart of the action: Erminia's charity. Poussin here fuses two distinct modes of reflexivity. The mastery of illusionism in the reflected face indexes authorial identity and the process of creation. Poussin then utilizes this motif as a trope of self-projection to register the biographical significance of the depicted story. In essence, he employs the mere "aspect" of visual illusion to construct a broader personal perspective of the narrative, a thematic "prospect." Poussin, through visualizing the literary text, has not merely "neglected nothing," as he once boasted, he has added something extraordinary to "reflect" on how painting and poetry can express life's tragedies and triumphs. (45) Not unlike the contextual self-portraits we have surveyed, the embedded face of the melancholy artist appropriates the subject to gloss amorous travails, physical infirmity and recovery, artistic tribulations and potency, and an appeal for redemption. Once one considers how the biographical circumstances of the early portraits of Poussin resonate with the episode from Tasso, the reflection simply confirms the degree to which Tancred and Erminia is poetically self-referential. As opposed to the weapon that "David" has wielded against Caravaggio/Goliath, the action of Erminia's sword heals rather than inflicts the fatal wounds of loves, from which Poussin is known to have suffered.

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The British Museum portrait records an infirm Poussin (Fig. 16). He looks haggard, wearied, and even contemptuous. The inscription on the mount, applied by a later collector, informs us that the artist drew himself in a mirror while convalescing from a grave malady about 1630. In an undated letter to Cassiano dal Pozzo, Poussin confesses that he has been sick most of the time. This statement has encouraged many to date the letter about 1629. But Poussin proceeds to describe his financial state as destitute, making this appeal for assistance more logically situated between 1625 and 1626, that is, after his introduction to Cassiano but before he had achieved the financial stability that followed his Barberini commissions. (46) Of all the early sources, Poussin's biographer and fellow painter Giovanni Battista Passeri divulges the most details about the artist's affliction. He specifies that the artist suffered from "the French disease [mal di Francia]," common slang for syphilis. (47) The artist apparently fell ill soon after his arrival in Rome in 1624, and the disease plagued him for the rest of his life, with occasional severe bouts, leaving him susceptible to other ailments as well. In letters from 1639 to Jean Lemaire and Chantelou, Poussin laments that "extreme bodily discomforts [extremes incommodites corporelles]" and the much greater torment of the so-called treatments prevented him from completing the Israelites Gathering Manna and making preparations to serve King Louis XIII in Paris. (48) Such complaints have encouraged advancing the British Museum portrait to this date, since aside from looking ill, Poussin appears older than his thirty-six years in 1630. (49) Placing the portrait drawing in 1639 may allow for a certain latitude in comparing it with the reflection in Vafrino's armor. However, Poussin may simply have been brutally honest in portraying himself sick in 1630. Bernini's portrait believed to depict the youthful artist, showing him unshaven, which likely dates from 1628-29, admits the possibility that Poussin was bearded during these years (Fig. 17). (50) This is all the more likely when we realize that the artist's illness became especially acute at this time.

Recently published letters from 1629 between Cassiano dal Pozzo and Pierre Poitier, a physician in Bologna, contain detailed prescriptions for a painter friend suffering from venereal disease, who must by all indications be Poussin. (51) Complementing this clinical evidence, Passeri movingly recounts that the painter long endured "great mortification and pain." When the disease became debilitating, Poussin had the good fortune to be taken into the care of the family of Jacques Dughet, a French cook. This samaritan arranged for surgeons and doctors, while his wife made every effort to keep the artist comfortable during the painful inflammations and treatments. After his recovery from the most severe bout of syphilis, though never totally cured, Poussin expressed his gratitude to Dughet by taking on his son Gaspard as a pupil and marrying his eldest daughter, Anne-Marie. Their wedding took place in September 1630. (52) Had Anne-Marie helped nurse her future spouse by her mother's side during the previous months? Although carnal passion had scourged Poussin with the most literal and painful wounds of love, affection between the artist and his young bride likely arose through nurturing, gratitude, and devotion. Unsurprisingly, given the nature of Poussin's illness, they never had children. After their marriage, Passeri tells us, Poussin was finally able to obtain peace of mind and spirit and devote himself fully to the study of his art. (53)

Scholars have begun to assess the impact of Poussin's disease and recovery on the development of his art. Konrad Oberhuber suggests that the crisis occasioned a decisive stylistic shift toward a more sobering classicism starting about 1630. (54) While such claims may be too all-encompassing, Poussin's desperate circumstances and ultimate good fortune would have made certain subjects resonate on a deeply personal level. Richard Verdi has observed how the prevalence of certain themes in Poussin's art, such as surrogate paternity and steadfastness before fate, may allude to his being an ailing foreigner persevering through adversity. (55) In a brilliant analysis, Cropper and Dempsey have related Poussin's venereal disease to the unusual conception of Mars and Venus, where the goddess dominates a markedly degendered warrior (Fig. 22). As they show, this supremacy is balanced by the Dulwich Venus and Mercury, where the god of art and eloquence points to the victory of Anteros over Eros (love over carnal passion), while the goddess has become a pensive embodiment of beauty, of artistic inspiration (Fig. 23). Referring to Michel de Montaigne's meditations on the representation of Venus in Virgil and Lucretius, the pictures exemplify how physical emasculation within a Venereal embrace could be overcome by the more enduring potency of artistic creativity. As Cropper and Dempsey convincingly propose, Poussin identified with these mythological themes to express the ascendancy of his artistic will over his physical degradation. (56) As Passeri confirms, however, such a triumph would not have been possible without the sustenance of the Dughet family. With this in mind, no literary subject could have been more pertinent to Poussin's life situation in 1629-30 than Tasso's tale of Erminia and Tancred. (57)

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Thanks to his friendship with the renowned poet Giambattista Marino, Poussin was intimately familiar with Tasso's Gerusalemme and uniquely adept at transforming its poetic imagery into visual conceits, or concetti. As the work of Cropper, Dempsey, and Anthony Colantuono demonstrates, Poussin, following Marino's example, introduced self-consciously metaphoric elements into his compositions to rival the poetic density of his literary sources or introduce new thematic dimensions to their significance. For Marino and Poussin alike, Tasso legitimated the cultivation of lyrical tropes, as the poet used them to enrich what is otherwise a lofty epic poem on the First Crusade. (58) For instance, Tasso describes Armida hovering over the dormant Rinaldo, suddenly smitten, with the metaphor "Narcissus at the fountain [Narcisso al fonte]." In the Dulwich Rinaldo and Armida, Poussin ingeniously conveys her narcissistic seduction by applying the sensuous attributes of her own beauty to the lusciously androgynous and Venereal Rinaldo, on whom she rivets her gaze (Fig. 5). (59) In a similar manner, the mirroring poses of Mars and Venus in the paired Boston and Dulwich pictures figure, metaphorically, the sublimation of mere physical allure into aesthetic beauty. As we have seen, the analogy of Achilles and the Christ Child forges a concetto on youthful evasion before embracing destiny. Through the reflected face, Poussin cultivates a highly personal inflection of the concetto in Tancred and Erminia. The literary personages and their actions embody neither mythological analogies nor abstract philosophical or moral principles but, rather, figure Poussin's own illness and recovery through love.

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In Poussin's composition, Erminia's form dominates the supine, wounded Tancred. Her legs straddle his raised knee. As her torso bends inward, its slope establishes the compositional pyramid that encompasses all three figures. Near its apex, Erminia's gleaming sword juts out against the empyrean. Poussin thereby endows the heroine with the potency and weaponry of Caravaggio and Allori's armed lovers, who display their amorous victims. The way Erminia physically dominates the inert Tancred surpasses even Venus's prowess over the impotent Mars in the Boston picture. In essence, Poussin invests Erminia with all the power of a femme fatale. Her sharp-edged weapon emblematizes the capacity of the lover to wound, as Poussin personally and painfully realized. But Erminia's action and resolve are all the more potent in that she harnesses the lethal weapon to heal literal wounds rather than deliver fatal blows, metaphoric or otherwise. This reveals Poussin's astute understanding of Erminia's significance in the Gerusalemme and his realization of how Tasso's verse epitomizes the painter's own circumstances as a victim of passion, redeemed through charity and love. And perhaps it was this identification that motivated Poussin to have his own apparition invade the scene.

Unlike the love of the conniving seductress Armida, who deployed every deception to seduce Rinaldo and, unwittingly, herself, Erminia's love for Tancred is based on compassion and her special gift as a healer. Erminia was captured when the crusaders conquered Antioch but later escaped to infidel Jerusalem. Tancred's gentle treatment of his vassal had sparked her love, inspired not so much by passion as empathy. As Erminia witnesses Tancred on the battlefield, each blow inflicted on his body trembles within her very being: "when the pagan raised the sword, her soul would feel / the shock and penetration of the steel" (6.63). Tasso always subordinates Erminia's amorous wounds to the treatment of her beloved's literal injuries from combat. Her overwhelming desire to heal Tancred compels her ill-fated ruse of fleeing Jerusalem in the armor of the warrior Clorinda, for whom he actually yearns. As such, Tancred embodies "concupiscence" in Tasso's "Allegoria del poema" that prefaces the Gerusalemme: his lust for an adversary detracts from his moral crusade. (60) When, much later, in the company of Vafrino, Erminia comes across the comatose warrior, her desperate lament of unfulfilled love becomes, at the first sign of his stirring, a heroic act of healing. She urgently removes her veil and shears her tresses to bind his wounds.

   She dries his wounds and binds them up as well
   with her own hair; she cut her hair--her veil
   was small and sheer, and never would have done
   for wounds so thick with blood, and of great size.
   Dittany root and crocus she had none,
   but she knew potent charms to make arise
   the lethal sleep that pressed the champion,
   till at last he could lift his eager eyes.

On regaining consciousness, Tancred acknowledges his beautiful physician, and she prescribes his recovery.

   He sees a gentle lady with his squire.
   She bends above him in her strange attire.
   "Vafrine," he asks, "how did you get here? When?
   My merciful physician, who are you?"
   She sighed for doubt and happiness at once,
   shading her lovely face with a rosy hue.
   "As your physician I'm prescribing rest,
   so you be still. You'll know, when the time's due.
   You will be cured--get ready for the fee."
   And she held his head to her bosom tenderly. (61)

Poussin, of course, paid his loving fee to Anne-Marie Dughet after his long convalescence, from an illness caused by physical passion. There is evidence that in addition to restoring Poussin to health, Anne-Marie inspired the artistic ingenuity of her husband and his closest friend, Francois Duquesnoy. The sculptor may have modeled a terra-cotta bust of Anne-Marie. A sketch of the lost work made by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin at a sale in 1775 is the only record of her features (Fig. 24). (62) While admittedly not conclusive testimony of Anne-Marie's appearance, the sketch shares the same facial structure, physique, and hairstyle as Poussin's figure of Erminia. Given the artist's recent personal circumstances when at work on the painting, I believe it is at least plausible that Poussin cast Anne-Marie in the guise of Erminia. While Poussin's figures are usually too generalized to be identified with specific models, this new female type appears in other works from around the time of his betrothal, such as the Realm of Flora from 1630-31 (Fig. 25). (63) The springtime goddess has the identical physical form, hair color, and boldly exposed leg as Erminia. Would it be outlandish to suggest that Poussin immortalized his young wife both as the Saracen healer, for her steadfastness and compassion, and as the springtime goddess, for the efflorescence of artistic activity this nurturing allowed? While Poussin sold Flora to Fabrizio Valguarnera in 1631, one wonders whether the far more personal Tancred and Erminia was not part of Poussin's legacy of gratitude to the Dughet family, culminating in his marriage to Anne-Marie. Since we know nothing of the painting's history before 1766, this is pure speculation, but speculation warranted, I believe, by the poetic aptness of its thematic association with Poussin's illness and recovery. Even if Tancred and Erminia were painted for a known patron, these personal references could still inhere in Poussin's approach to the theme, much as they underlie the Mars and Venus painted for Cassiano dal Pozzo. But the surreptitious inclusion of the portrait in Vafrino's armor suggests an intimate context for the painting. The motif requires a beholder who, on encountering the artist face to face, might understand how Erminia's charity allegorizes his own rehabilitation through selfless love and compassion. It may be difficult for us to ascribe such a vivid expression of personal feeling to an artist who, years later, in the self-portrait made for Chantelou would devise a recondite concetto to encode his closest friendship. Yet perhaps we can now empathize with Honore de Balzac, who, in Le chef d'oeuvre inconnu, intuited that the young, impetuous Poussin, consumed with passion for his mistress, "exulted in their love before taking possession of his art." (64)

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The face in the armor is Poussin's personal meditation on his own infirmity, recovery, and the repercussions for his life and art. In one of his most poetic inventions, the drama unfolding around this private "reflection" stages the most reverent and tender act of healing in the history of art, rivaled perhaps only by Georges de La Tour's Saint Irene Healing Saint Sebastian. As the faithful Vafrino hoists up the reviving warrior, his reflective armor attests to Poussin's own salvation. With the face resting against his fist, the apparition assumes the pose of melancholy--an affirmation of how the artistic temperament is born from overcoming tribulation and suffering. (65) As the lovelorn Erminia sacrifices her beauty to bind and heal Tancred's wounds, Poussin gazes out at his own selfless nursemaids: the women of the Dughet family who labored tirelessly to comfort him during his convalescence. One suspects he looks at Anne-Marie in particular, who has evolved from nursemaid to wife to model to muse. For Tancred and Poussin alike, the literal wounds of passion, whether martial or venereal, have been succored by true charity and enduring love. In no other work does Poussin attain this level of personal identity and poetic poignancy. The picture is both ex-voto and vow of love.

Notes

I would like to thank Marc Gotlieb and the anonymous Art Bulletin readers for suggesting valuable improvements to the manuscript. The text has benefited from Lory Frankel's expert editing. My gratitude goes to Benjamin Binstock and Sheila McTighe, who read the manuscript and encouraged rewarding paths of inquiry. Thanks as well to Frederick Ilchmann, Jim Wright, Jennifer Stern, and Michael Henchman for helping to confirm what I saw.

The content of this article was first presented at the College Art Association Conference in Seattle in February 2004. My thanks to Jeffrey Collins and Margaret Carroll, who chaired the open session on Baroque art, to the other participants Harry Berger Jr., Perry Brooks. Todd Olson, and David Stone, and especially to Erika Naginski, for her thoughtful comments as respondant.

Where not cited otherwise, translations are mine.

1. On Caravaggio's Medusa, his ownership of a convex mirror, and the likelihood he studied his own reflection to create the Gorgon's expression, see Catherine Puglisi, Caravaggio (London: Phaidon, 1998), 109; Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 87-89; and Avigdor Poseq, "Caravaggio's Medusa Shield," Gazette des Beaux-Arts 113 (1989): 170-74.

2. Bellori, 229-30: "Professavasi egli inoltre tanto ubbidiente al modello che non si faceva propria ne meno una pennellata, la quale diceva non essere sua ma della natura" (Furthermore, he himself claimed to be so obedient to the model that he never made anything, not even a brushstroke, which he said was his own, but rather that it was from nature). See also the comments from Caravaggio's lifetime by Karel van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck (Haarlem, 1604), trans. in Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 344: "His belief is that all art is nothing but a bagatelle or children's work, whatever it is and whoever it is by, unless it is done after life, and we can do no better than to follow Nature. Therefore he will not make a single brush-stroke without the close study of life, which he copies and paints."

3. Through Caravaggio's well-known artistic practice, the painted canvas literally mirrored the studio mise-en-scene. Caravaggio first arranged models, props, and sometimes himself, as a still-life composition or tableau vivant in the studio (with lighting controlled through a ceiling hatch), which the artist then transferred directly onto the canvas, first with incised outlines, followed by increasingly refined brushwork. On this procedure, see Keith Christiansen, "Caravaggio and "l'Esempio davanti del Naturale,'" Art Bulletin 68 (1986): 421-45. For an excellent critical survey of the relation of naturalism (transparency of the model), (self-) reflection, and the role of the spectator in Caravaggio's art, see Sheila McTighe, "Caravaggio's Mirror, or The Limits of Self-Reflection," forthcoming. She suggests that the surface of Caravaggio's easel pictures, which record the presence of the model in the studio, simulate the actual appearance of the mirror Caravaggio likely referenced while painting. This idea, wherein the mirror isolates the "block of reality" to be reproduced, had first been formulated by Roberto Longhi, Caravaggio, ed. Giovanni Previtali (Rome: Ruiniti, 1982), 46-48. The notion that the painted surface of Caravaggio's works becomes the phenomenological successor to the mirror reflecting the artist as he painted--indeed, immersed himself bodily into the work--underlies the critical project of Michael Fried, "Thoughts on Caravaggio," Critical Inquiry 24 (1997): 13-56.

4. Andre Felibien, Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes: V & VI Entretiens (Paris, 1679), quoted in Thuillier, 193: "M. Poussin ... ne pouvoit rien souffrir du Caravage, & disoit qu'il estoit venu au monde pour destruire la Peinture. Mais il ne faut pas s'estonner de l'aversion qu'il avoit pour luy. Car si le Poussin cherchoit la noblesse dans ses subjets, le Caravage se laissoit emporter a la verite du naturel tel qu'il le voyoit, Ainsi ils estoient bien opposez l'un a l'autre' (Poussin could not abide Caravaggio and said that he had come into the world to destroy painting. The aversion he had toward him should hardly come as a surprise. For whereas Poussin sought out the nobility of his subjects, Caravaggio left himself to display the truth of nature such as he saw it. Therefore they are very much opposed the one to the other). Poussin's remarks, which Felibien likely heard directly from the artist, may paraphrase Giovanni Baglione, Le vite dei pittori, scultori et architetti (Rome, 1642), trans, in Hibbard (as in n. 2), 355: "Anzi presso alcuni si stima, haver'esso rovinata la pittura" (Moreover, some people thought that he had destroyed the art of painting). Poussin's quotation is the point of departure for Louis Marin's probing analysis of the painter's commitment to a constructed pictorial narrative opposed to the illusion of spontaneous mimetic mirroring presence in Caravaggio's works, exemplified in Medusa. On how Caravaggio's paintings undermine the very idea of representation, see Marin. 100: "The paradox of Caravaggio's work ... consists in copying the truth of what appears in so slavish a manner that the pictural representation becomes a mere effect. That is, truth is an effect of painting and not its origin. In his paintings Caravaggio irritatingly and sadomasochistically raises the question of truth in painting. Because a Caravaggio painting slavishly subordinates itself to the thing itself as it appears before one's eyes, it cannot be a representation of this thing. Instead, it is the presentation of this thing's double. What we have here is a simulacrum, a trompe l'oeil, an excess of mimesis."

5. The most thorough and successful attempt to integrate formal style, poetic interpretation, and meditations on art and life in the analysis of Poussin's works is Cropper and Dempsey. As they observe: "the familiar literary and historical subjects chosen by Poussin were also conceived by him as matters for critical interpretation on the part of both the painter and the viewer, for whom the painting initiates a kind of dialogue" (13).

6. The basic conceit of Poussin's Self-Portrait of 1650 for Chantelou is recorded in Bellori, 455: "Dietro nell'altra tavola contraria e figurata la testa di una donna in profilo con un occhio sopra la fronte nel diadema: questa e la Pittura; e v'appariscono due mani che l'abbracciano, cioe l'amore di essa pittura e l'amicizia, a cui e dedicato il ritratto" (Behind the other reversed picture there is figured the head of a woman in profile with an eye mounted on the crest of her diadem: This is Painting, and there appear two hands that embrace her, they represent the love of painting and friendship, to which the portrait is dedicated). The foregoing account of Poussin's Self-Portrait painted for Paul Freart de Chantelou in 1650 incorporates ideas from several important studies. On the invention of the figure of "Pittura" from the iconography of prudence, knowledge, and perspective, see Donald Posner, "The Picture of Painting in Poussin's Self Portrait," in Essays in the History of Art Presented to Rudolf Wittkower, ed. Douglas Fraser, Howard Hibbard, and Milton J. Lewine (London: Phaidon, 1967), 200-203. On the fragmentary nature of the painter's self-image, which reinforces its status as a represented absence rather than illusionistic presence, see Oskar Batschmann, Nicolas Poussin: Dialectics of Painting (London: Reaktion, 1990), 47-53. On Poussin's conceptual analogy between painting and friendship, as each is intellectually cultivated from absence and desire, see Cropper and Dempsey, 188-96. As they note, Poussin constructs a dialogue between artist and beholder not to create an illusory presence but to propound the ideal of comprehending painting. The background allegory demonstrates how "the perfected judgment of the art of painting is reciprocated and embraced by the perfect judgment of comprehending looking that does not mistake signification for presence" (189). On how the background "story" of perceiving the idea of painting not only abstracts but also defers the perceptual encounter of painter and beholder, see Louis Marin, "Variations on an Absent Portrait: Poussin's Self-Portraits, 1649-1650," in Sublime Poussin, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 183-208. For further on how the Self-Portrait propounds Poussin's theory of art, his intellectual mode of painting and seeing, see Matthias Winner, "Poussins Selbstbildnis im Louvre al Kunsttheoretische Allegorie," Romisches Jahrbuch fur Kunstgeschichte 20 (1983): 417-49; and Peter Joch, Methode und Inhalt: Momente von kunstlerischer Selbstreferenz im Werk von Nicolas Poussin (Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovac, 2003), 163-88.

7. On Poussin's definition of aspect and prospect, see Nicolas Poussin, Lettres et propos sur l'art, ed. Anthony Blunt (Paris: Hermann, 1989), 73, no. 61 (to Francois Sublet de Noyers): "II faut savoir ... qu'il y a deux manieres de voir les objets, l'une en les voyant simplement, et l'autre en les considerant avec attention. Voir simplement n'est autre chose que recevoir naturellement dans l'oeil la forme et la ressemblance de la chose vue. Mais voir un objet en le considerant, c'est qu'outre la simple et naturelle reception de la forme dans l'oeil, l'on cherche avec une application particuliere le moyen de bien connaitre ce meme objet: ainsi on peut dire que le simple aspect est une operation naturelle, et que ce que je nomme le prospect est un office de raison qui depend de trois choses, savoir de l'oeil, du rayon visuel, et de la distance de l'oeil a l'object: et c'est de cette connaissance dont il serait a souhaiter que ceux qui se melent de donner leur jugement fussent bien instruits" (One must understand ... that there are two manners of viewing objects, one by seeing them simply, and the other by considering them with attention. To see simply is nothing other than to receive naturally in the eye the form and the appearance of the thing seen. But to see an object with consideration, that is beyond the simple and natural reception of the form in the eye, one seeks with a particular application the means to understand well this same object: furthermore one can say that the simple aspect is a natural operation, and that which I name the prospect is an office of reason that depends on three things: knowledge of the eye, of the visual ray, and the distance from the eye to the object. And it is in this knowledge that one would wish that those who meddle in giving their judgment were well informed). Poussin's terminology derives from 16th-century perspective theory, see Carl Goldstein, "The Meaning of Poussin's Letter to Sublet de Noyers," Burlington Magazine 108 (1966): 233-35. On Poussin's notion of a constructed prospect opposing the unmediated mimesis, the superficial aspect, of Caravaggio's works, as it was construed in a number of key texts, see Marin, 6, 45-48, 103. For recent discussion of the implications of these categories of seeing for Poussin's paintings and art theory, see Thomas Puttfarken, "Poussin's Thoughts on Painting," in Commemorating Poussin: Reception and Interpretation of the Artist, ed. Katie Scott and Genevieve Warwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 66-72. Puttfarken claims that the creation of highly constructed narrative scenes of often obscure literary subjects on a cabinet-picture scale was part of Poussin's professional strategy to distinguish his art from the realism and spectacle of his contemporaries. On how the single eye of Pittura relates to the iconography of rational perspective and prudence, and how it accords with Poussin's definition of "prospect," see Posner (as in n. 6), 201-2.

8. For the dialectic between painting as the mimetic illusion of appearances, of the model, on a surface, embodied by Caravaggio, and painting as visual narration of an imagined story, enunciated through the constructed stage of a representation, as exemplified by Poussin, see Marin, 3-6, 99-109.

9. Elizabeth Cropper, "Conception and Deception: Poussin's Mirrors," Cleveland Studies in the History of Art 4 (1999): 76-95. The specific pendants are Holy Family with Nine Figures (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass.) and Achilles on Skyros (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), both painted in 1650-51; and Holy Family with Eleven Figures (Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena) and Achilles on Skyros (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond), painted in 1651 and 1656, respectively, for the duc de Crequi. As Cropper and Richard Wallace have suggested, the improvised hand mirror may refer to a scene from Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata (16.20-22) where the Achilles-like hero, Rinaldo, becomes enamored and feminized to the point of assisting in his beloved Armida's toilette; see Wallace, "The Later Version of Poussin's Achilles on Skyros," Studies in the Renaissance 9 (1962): 322-29. Cropper also observes a metaphoric mirroring among the reflective bodies of water depicted in the Los Angeles Holy Family and the Richmond Achilles. The stream behind the Virgin signifies her purity, symbolized as a "spotless mirror," whereas the Achilles scene takes place before the Lago di Nemi, sacred to the virgin goddess Diana in antiquity and called the Speculum Dianae (Mirror of Diana). A literal reflection also signals a mythological metaphor in Pyramus and Thisbe, where the placement of a reconstructed Temple of Bacchus on the bank of a preternaturally glassy pond signifies the legendary mirror of Bacchus; see Batschmann (as in n. 6), 105-8. On the doubling reflections in Poussin's landscapes emblematizing their thematic pairings, see also Todd Olson, Poussin and France: Painting, Humanism, and the Politics of Style (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 239-41.

10. In an episode that presages the action and the ambience of Erminia's discovery of Tancred, Carlo, the sole survivor of Soliman's slaughter of the heroic Danish forces, finds the corpse of his commander, Sveno, on a bloody heap, illuminated by the nighttime sky. Carlo's tears, like Erminia's, wash the wounds, before he can proceed with a proper burial. Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, ed. Bruno Maier (Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1982). 8.32: "Allor veggi'io che da la bella face, / anzi dal sol notturno, un raggio scende / che dritto la dove il gran corpo giace, / quasi aureo tratto di pennel, si stende; / e sovra lui tal lume e tanto face / ch'ogni sua piaga ne sfavilla e splende, / e subito da me si raffigura / ne la sanguigna orribile mistura" (Then I saw that from the beautiful light, / or rather from the nocturnal sun, a ray descend / straight to where the great corpse lies / almost a golden stroke of the brush, spreading, / so that above him there was such light and such radiance / that each one of his wounds sparkles and shines. / and right away he materialized before me / among the horrible bloody mixture).

11. Natalia Serebriannaia, entry to cat, no. 16, in French Drawings and Paintings from the Hermitage: Poussin to Picasso, by Timothy Clifford, Irina Novoselkaya et al., exh. cat., Somerset House, London, 2001, 60-61.

12. On Tancred and Erminia, see the recent catalogues by Verdi, 1992, 16-22, 50, cat. no. 6; idem, 1995, 182-83, cat. no. 21; and Rosenberg, 187-88, cat. no. 35 (with references to Russian bibliography). Neither is there any mention of the reflection in the major monographs; see Thuillier, 251, cat. no. 86; Alain Merot, Nicolas Poussin (New York: Abbeville Press, 1990), 287, cat. no. 196; Kurt Badt, Die Kunst des Nicolas Poussin (Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1969), 520-22; Anthony Blunt, The Paintings of Nicolas Poussin (London: Phaidon, 1966), 142, cat. no. 206; and Otto Grautoff, Nicolas Poussin: Sein Werk und sein Leben (Munich: Georg Muller, 1914), 108-9, 131, pl. 39. Furthermore, there is no mention of the reflected face in the translated works of Russian scholars; see Mikhail Alpatov, "Poussin's Tancred and Erminia in the Hermitage: An Interpretation," in Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Art Presented to Anthony Blunt on His 60th Birthday (London: Phaidon, 1967), 130-35; Yuri Zolotov and Natalia Serebriannaia, Nicolas Poussin dans les musees de l'Union Sovietique (Leningrad: Aurora, 1990), 65-66, cat. no. 8; and Natalia Serebriannaia, entry to cat. no. 3, in From Poussin to Matisse: The Russian Taste for French Painting, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1990, 40.

13. On the importance of the study of the Zaccolini and Leonardo manuscripts for Poussin's profound theoretical interest in chiaroscuro, see "On the Experience of Light and Color: Poussin, Padre Zaccolini, Cassiano dal Pozzo, and the Legacy of Leonardo," in Cropper and Dempsey, 145-74; and Janis Bell, "Zaccolini's Theory of Color Perpsective," Art Bulletin 75 (1993): 91-112. The manuscript of Leonardo da Vinci's Trattato della pittura, assembled from the master's notes by Francesco Melzi in the early 16th century, was transferred to the Barberini library after the annexation of the duchy of Urbino to the Holy See in 1631. Cassiano ordered the manuscript to be copied for publication, with gaps left in the text for the insertion of illustrations by Poussin, executed about 1637. The copy and the illustrations were brought to Paris by Chantelou, in the company of Poussin, in 1640 to be translated by his brother: Traite de la peinture de Leonard da Vinci donne au public et traduit d'italien en francois par R(oland) F(reart) S(ieur) d(e) C(hambray) (Paris, 1651). Poussin's illustrations were engraved by Charles Errard, much to the master's displeasure. On Poussin and Leonardo's treatise, see Bellori, 451-52; Andre Felibien, Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes: Huitieme entretien (Trevoux, 1725), facsimile in Claire Pace, Felibien's Life of Poussin (London: Zwemmer, 1981), 21-23; Jan Bialostocki, "Poussin et le 'Traite de la Peinture' de Leonardo," in Actes du colloque international Nicolas Poussin, ed. Andre Chastel (Paris: CNRS, 1960), vol. 1, 133-40; and Thuillier, 164-66. On Poussin's drawings related to the Trattato project, preserved in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, along with the dal Pozzo copy of the Codex Urbinas, see Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat, Nicolas Poussin 1594-1665: Catalogue raisonne des dessins (Milan: Leonardo, 1994), vol. 1, 240-51, cat. no. 29.

14. Leonardo da Vinci, "Parte Prima" of the Codex Vaticanus Urbinas 1270, chap. 38, lines 17-20, reprinted and trans, in Claire Farago, Leonardo da Vinci's "Paragone": A Critical Interpretation with a New Edition of the "Codex Urbinas" (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), 267. For Leonardo, painting had the unique capacity to imitate the surface of the mirror and, at the same time, the mirror itself stood as a metaphor and verification of painting's mimetic aims; see Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo on Painting, ed. Martin Kemp (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 202-3; and Jodi Cranston, The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 130-33.

15. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite dei piu eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architelli, ed. G. Milanesi (Florence, 1878-85), vol. 4, 98.

16. Paolo Pino, Dialogo di pittura, reprinted in Paola Barocchi, ed., Trattati d'arte del cinquecento (Bari: Laterza, 1960), vol. 1, 131.

17. On Savoldo's Gaston de Foix, in the French royal collection since the 16th century and recorded at Fontainebleau in 1625, though then often attributed to Giorgione, see Creighton Gilbert, The Works of Girolamo Savoldo (New York: Garland, 1986), 181, cat. no. 29; Alessandro Ballarin, Le siecle de Titien, exh. cat., Musee du Louvre, Paris, 1993, 400, cat. no. 74; and Elena Lucchesi Ragni, entry to cat. no. 1.26, in Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo: Tra Foppa Giorgione e Caravaggio, exh. cat., Monastero di S. Giulia, Brescia (Milan: Electa, 1990), 164-66. On the relation of Gaston de Foix to Giorgione's lost works and the paragone debates, see Andrew John Martin, Savoldos sogenanntes "Bildnis des Gaston de Foix": Zum Problem des Paragone in der Kunst und Kunsttheorie der Italienischen Renaissance (Simaringen: J. Thorbecke, 1995); and Cranston (as in n. 14), 133-40. As many of these studies note, there is a general consensus that the Louvre painting is actually a self-portrait (of Savoldo), though this is not how the work was understood in Poussin's time, since its features did not correspond with known portraits of Giorgione.

18. On Ambroise Dubois's Clorinda cycle, commissioned by Marie de Medicis for the Cabinet de la Reine, Fontainebleau, and the compositional similarities between Dubois's Baptism of Clorinda and Poussin's Hermitage picture, see Verdi, 1992, 23-24; Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1967), 22-23; as well as the entry to cat. no. 70 by C. S. Verlet in Torquato Tasso tra letteratura, musica, teatro e arti figurative, ed. Andrea Buzzoni, exh. cat., Castello Estense, Ferrara (Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1985), 234-37.

19. On the implications of mirroring and self-reflexivity in Savoldo's "self-portrait," its relation to Giorgione's lost works, and its "conversion of a painting that figures the superiority of the art into a portrait type," see the exemplary analysis in Cranston (as in n. 14), 133-40.

20. On the use of reflection in painting and how it affects the ontology of representation, see the general surveys in Jonathan Miller, On Reflection, exh. cat., National Gallery, London, 1998; Pierre Georgel and Anne-Marie Lecoq, La peinture dans la peinture, exh. cat., Musee des Beaux-Arts, Dijon, 1983. The essential text on how 16th- and 17th-century artists used the tropes of reflection and mise-en-abyme to expose the limits of painting is Stoichita, esp. 186-97, 215-55.

21. Leon Battista Alberti, Della pittura, ed. Luigi Malle (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1950), 77-78: "Pero usai di dire tra i miei amici, secondo la sentenzia de' poeti, quel Narcisso convertito in fiore essere della pittura stato inventore: che gia, ove sia la pictura fiore d'ogni arte, ivi tutta la storia di Narcisso viene a proposito. Che dirai tu essere dipingere, altra cosa che simile abracciare con arte quella ivi superficie del fonte." Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson (New York: Penguin, 1991), 61: "According to the poets, Narcissus, converted into a flower, was the inventor of painting: being thus his entire story pertains to the question, since painting is, after all, the flower of every art. What is painting but the act of embracing by means of art the surface of the pool?" On Alberti's original formulation of the conceit that Narcissus invented painting, based in part on the poetic imagery of Philostratus and Ovid, see Gerhard Wolf. "The Origins of Painting." Res 36 (1999): 60-78. For further observations on Narcissus as the inventor of painting, and Caravaggio's and Poussin's renditions of the origin myth of their art (in the Galleria Nazionale, Rome, and the Louvre, respectively), where in the former shows the youth immersed in the resemblance of the mirror, whereas the latter depicts floral metamorphosis and the genesis of representation through signs, see Hubert Damisch, "D'un Narcisse a l'autre," Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 12 (1976): 113-46; and Stephen Bann, The True Vine: On Visual Representation and the Western Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 138-56.

22. For references to the copious literature on the mirror imagery in Las meninas and the Arnolfini Wedding, see Stoichita, 192-97, 217, 247-55, 308 n. 104, 312 n. 66. A particularly thorough investigation of the rhetoric of reflection in painting, especially in relation to the theoretical discourse on Las meninas (encompassing Michel Foucault, John Searle, Leo Steinberg, Svetlana Alpers, Joel Snyder, and Ted Cohen), is found in Mieke Bal, Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word--Image Opposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 247-85. On how the artistic agenda of Las meninas intersects with the aims of Poussin's Self-Portrait, see Wolfgang Kemp, "Teleologie det Malerei: Selbstportrat und Zukunstreflexion bei Poussin und Velazquez," in Der Kunstler uber sich in seinem Werk: Internationales Symposium der Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rom, 1989, ed. Matthias Winner (Weinheim: VCH Acta Humaniora, 1992), 407-33.

23. On the reflection in The Madonna of Canon van der Paele, see D. G. Carter, "Reflections in Armour in the Canon Van der Paele Madonna," Art Bulletin 36 (1954): 60-62; and David Farmer, "Further Reflections on a Van Eyck Self-Portrait," Oud Holland 83 (1968): 159-60. On van Eyck's emulation of Phidias's self-projection onto his own work, recorded in Plutarch (Life of Pericles 31.2-5), Pliny (Natural History 36.18), and Cicero (Tusculan Disputations 1.15.34), see Stoichita, 220-21; Rudolf Preimesburger, "Zu Jan Van Eycks Diptychon der Sammlung Thyssen-Bornemisza," Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte 54 (1991): 473-74, 484-85. Thanks to Benjamin Binstock for this reference.

24. See, for instance, Clara Peeters's Still Life of 1612 (Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe) and Pieter Claesz, Vanitas Still Life (Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg), in which a self-portrait of the artist at work is reflected, respectively, on glass globules embedded in a golden goblet and on a spherical mirror. For the significance of these self-portraits, see Celeste Brusati, "Stilled Lives: Self-Portraiture and Self-Reflection in Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Still-Life Painting," Simiolus 20 (1990): 168-82. Thanks to Sheila McTighe for this reference. The reflection in the Claesz exposes the production of the very painting we see, since within the reflective glass sphere the still-life composition itself is shown from behind, receding toward the painter working at his easel. Process and product thus paradoxically coexist; see Stoichita, 222-25. On the depiction of reflections, the interaction of light and surfaces, as central to the critical valuation of realism in Netherlandish painting, see Walter Melion's discussion of Karel van Mander's category of "reflexy-const" in Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander's Schilder-Boeck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 70-77.

25. Most Caravaggio scholars acknowledge the presence of the image within the reflection on the glass carafe, which is notoriously difficult to reproduce. For a thorough review of scholarship on the reflection, see Mina Gregori, entry to cat, no. 71, in The Age of Caravaggio, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1985, 241-46.

26. Baglione (as in n. 4), 352: "Indi provo a stare da se stesso, e fece alcuni quadretti da lui nello specchio ritratti." On Caravaggio's mastery of still life, see the description of a lost painting of a glass vase of flowers reflecting the windows of the studio in Bellori, 213. On Caravaggio's only surviving independent still life, painted for Federico Borromeo, see Hibbard (as in n. 2), 80-84; Puglisi (as in n. 1); and Gregori (as in n. 25), 262-65. See also Mina Gregori et al., La natura morta al tempo di Caravaggio, exh. cat., Musei Capitolini, Rome, 1996.

27. The foregoing summarizes, with vast simplification, the brilliant analysis of the autoreflexivity of Caravaggio's early works by Fried (as in n. 3), 19-23, 31-47. In the case of Bacchus, he notes in particular: "the reflection may be taken as acknowledging not just the self-portrait character of the representation as a whole but also that what ultimately is portrayed in the Bacchus is the production of the Bacchus, with everything that that implies" (46). For a sensitive response to Fried's critical project, though skeptical on whether these early genre figures are literal self-portraits, see McTighe (as in n. 3). She suggests that the common usage of the mirror by artists to study and paint the reflection of the posed model, and not necessarily of oneself, may be the sense of Baglione's statement. She notes that the painted surface of Bacchus, in particular, discloses the mirror image of the model, whether Caravaggio himself or another sitter, as it appeared during the painting session, while the carafe reflection reveals the artist absorbed in the making. For the beholder, the reflective highlight evokes the specular interface of artist, mirror, and model that generated the entire image, which has supplanted the surface of mirror. In Bacchus and numerous other works by Caravaggio that record a mirror presence, McTighe detects a deliberate self-reflexivity, which generates, on the part of the spectator, first identification and then disillusionment.

28. On the cultural evolution of the idea of melancholy, from its being a physiological state caused by an excess of bile to embodying the saturnine temperament amenable to artistic inspiration, as figured in Durer's engraving, see Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Durer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), vol. 1, 156-71. On Durer's Melancholia as a disguised self-portrait, and for a genealogy of the gesture of melancholy in the artist's earlier pen-and-ink Self-Portrait of 1491 (Universitatsbibliothek, Erlangen) and representations of Job and Christ as Man of Sorrows, see Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 4-33.

29. Marin, 115-22, 132-44. The following passages summarize Marin's interpretation, which hinges on the paradoxical nature of Caravaggio's Medusa both as a painted representation of a (self-) reflective surface at the instant of the Gorgon's decapitation and petrifaction and as an actual convex shield featuring an astonishingly mimetic depiction of the petrifying motif: "The shield is both the shield of Persens and the shield of the Grand Duke. It is the specular tool of the violent heroic ruse and a spectacular ornament symbolizing the Duke's virtue and power. The head is a reflected image, and thus the product of a representation, but it is also a simulacrum and a double; as such, it is representation itself. The head is a reflection made at the very moment before death. It is a double of the dead Gorgon, her petrified figure, forever frozen immediately after her death. This head exists in the here and now, yet it is also part of the past, frozen in representation" (121). "The shield still has the power to stupefy and petrify enemies and onlookers. The moment of self-representation and automorphosis is captured in the instant of representation, the moment when the object is exposed to sight. The Gorgon's face-off with her own reflection, seized and frozen at the moment of the original glancing blow, has become a face-off between the Gorgon and the viewer in a painting / shield that indefinitely repeats the unique, unlocalizable, signless moment of the original scene" (138-39). The painting's conceit of mesmerizing the beholder to the point of petrifaction, its "Medusa effect," has long been recognized, especially in the poems celebrating the Medusa by the artist's contemporaries Giambattista Marino and Gaspare Murtola; see Maurizio Marini, Caravaggio: Michelangleo Merisi da Caravaggio "pictor praestentissimus" (Rome: Newton Compton, 1987), 403-5; and especially Elizabeth Cropper, "The Petrifying Art: Marino's Poetry and Caravaggio," Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991): 202-8.

30. On the Medusa as an apotropaic device on the shields of Athena and Zeus, and how Caravaggio's boldly projecting illusion relates to the sculptural origin of the motif, if not Athena's actual affixing of Perseus's tribute to her shield, see Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 120; and Poseq (as in n. 1), 170 (citing Ovid, Metamorphoses lines 374-82).

31. The relationship of Caravaggio's Medusa to Phidias's self-portrait has been suggested by Poseq (as in n. 1), 172-74. It should be noted, however, that while Athena's shield contained the apotropaic gorgoneion at the center of its convex surface, Phidias portrayed himself as one of the Greeks in the Amazonomachy depicted around its perimeter; see Plutarch. "Life of Pericles," 31.5, reprinted and trans. in J. J. Pollitt, The Art of Greece 1400-31 B.C.: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965). 66-67. Other ancient sources simply record the self-portrait as a well-known signature: see Cicero. Tusculan Disputations. trans. J. E. King (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950), 40-41 (1.15.34). On the appearance of the Athena Parthenos, see Kenneth Lapatin, Chryselephantine Statuary in the Ancient Mediterranean World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 63-78.

32. Scholars usually place Tancred and Erminia to the period 1630-31, close to the documented completion of the Realm of Flora for Fabrizio Valguarnera in 1631; see Verdi, 1992, 16-22, 50, cat. no. 6; Verdi, 1995, 182-83, cat. no. 21; Thuillier, 251, cat. no. 86; Zolotov and Serebriannaia (as in n. 12), 65-66, cat. no. 8; and Denis Mahon, Poussiniana: Afterthoughts Arising from the Exhibition (Paris: Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1962), 28. Some have suggested a slightly later date, between 1631 and 1633, such as Blunt (as in n. 12), 142, cat. no. 206. Citing the picture's evocative painterly style, others have argued it should be placed somewhat earlier, to 1629, or even to 1628; see Merot (as in n. 12), 287, cat. no. 196: and Rosenberg, 187-88, cat. no. 35. Much of the painting's dazzling effect, however, derives from its twilight setting and incandescent lighting, while the composition itself has the geometric design and dramatic focus of Poussin's more classicizing works. Stylistically, the figures and dense atmosphere are rendered in a manner similar to that of the Plague of Ashdod, another shadowy twilight scene, which was documented as painted for Valguarnera in 1631. As these references note, the first record we have of the picture is its 1766 sale to Czarina Catherine the Great from the Parisian collection of Jacques Andre Joseph Aved.

33. The portrait has been excluded from the new corpus by Rosenberg and Prat (as in n. 13), 902-3, cat. no. R489. Reservations about the attribution were first voiced in Pierre Rosenberg, "Review of Poussin Drawings from British Collections, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum." Burlington Magazine 133 (1991): 212. Most scholars, with whom I am inclined to agree, still uphold the traditional attribution to Poussin; see K. Oberhuber, Poussin; The Early Years in Rome, exh. cat., Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Tex., 1988, 233, 349, cat. no. D 177; Thuillier, 42; and Verdi, 1992, 55, no. 11. The early-18th-century inscription recounts that the drawing was given by the artist to Camillo Massimi, a close friend, pupil, and later patron. Since the inscription was composed by the Florentine collector Francesco Maria Nicolo Gabburi, who bought it directly from the Massimi family and mounted other artists' self-portraits in a similar manner, there is no reason to doubt the identity of the sitter; see Nicholas Turner, "L'autoportrait dessine de Poussin au British Museum," in Merot, vol. 1, 81-97.

34. On the portrait in the York Art Gallery, once considered a self-portrait but now generally accepted as a portrait of Poussin by Bernini, see Blunt (as in n. 12), 97; Ann Sutherland Harris, "Vouet, le Bernin, et la 'ressemblance parlante,'" in Simon Vouet: Actes du colloque international, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 5-6-7 fevrier 1991, ed. Stephan Loire (Paris: La Documentation Francaise, 1992), 204; and Christopher Baker, entry to cat. no. 34, in Effigies and Ecstasies: Roman Baroque Sculpture and Design in the Age of Bernini, ed. Aidan Weston-Lewis, exh. cat., National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1998, 82-83.

35. On Poussin and Duquesnoy, see Bellori, 289, 426-27; Joachim von Sandrart, Teutsche Academie (1675), reprinted in Thuillier, 185; Passeri, 112, 325; and Cropper and Dempsey, 26-63. On the cohabitation of the painter and sculptor in Rome in 1626, see Thuillier, 112; and Donatella Sparti, "La Maison de Nicolas Poussin," in Merot, vol. 1, 47.

36. For the most recent discussion of Van Dyck's Portrait of Francois Duquesnoy (Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels), variously dated to the painter's Roman sojourn of 1622 or to 1627-29, after his return to Antwerp, see the entry to cat. no. 2, with further references, by Lucian Arcangeli, in L'idea del bello: Viaggio per Roma nel seicento con Giovan Pietro Bellori, exh. cat., Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 2000, vol. 2, 313-14.

37. On contextual self-projection, see Stoichita, 200-206.

38. On these self-portraits, see most recently, with further references, Giovanna dell'Orto, "Caravaggio: Self Portraits as Exploration of Living Reality," Gazette des Beaux-Arts 138 (2001): 225-32. A recent interpretation of the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew argues that Caravaggio depicted himself not as a mere witness but as the fleeing assassin of the saint; see Thomas Puttfarken, "Caravaggio's Story of St. Matthew: A Challenge to the Conventions of Painting," Art History 21 (1998): 163-81.

39. The most thorough accounts of this painting are Herwarth Rottgen, Il Caravaggio: Ricerche e interpretazioni (Rome: Bulzoni, 1974), 201-14; and Avigdor Poseq, "Caravaggio's Self Portrait as the Beheaded Goliath," Konsthistorik Tidskrift 3 (1990): 169-82. Both authors discuss the penitential aspects of the painting and the literary and artistic trope of depicting the lover defeated and wounded by the cruel beloved. The identity of Goliath as a self-portrait of Caravaggio was noted in Bellori, 223. This self-portrait is noted in an earlier (1650) inventory of the Borghese collection, which states that the David portrays "il suo Caravaggino." The prevailing interpretation of this statement identifies "Caravaggino" with one of Caravaggio's live-in assistants, perhaps Francesco Buonieri, better known as the painter Cecco da Caravaggio, rumored to have been the artist's lover. See the survey of interpretations in Puglisi (as in n. 1), 359-65; and Gregori (as in n. 25), 338-41. On the homoerotic implications of the story of David in general, see Adrian Randolph, "Homosocial Desire and Donatello's Bronze David," in Engaging Symbols: Gender, Polities, and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 160-92.

40. On Allori's picture of 1613 and its portraits, see John Shearman, "Cristofano Allori's 'Judith,'" Burlington Magazine 121 (1979): 3-10. On how the story of Judith and Holofernes, as a heterosexual inversion of David and Goliath, lent itself to figuring poetically the frustrated desire of scorned lovers, see Mary Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 299-305. The conventional poetic analogy between the fatal blow of the sword and the wounds of love is evident in Giambattista Marino's poem on Allori's picture in La galleria (Venice, 1619), reprinted in Marino, Opere scelte di Giovan Battista Marino e dei Marinisti, ed. Giovanni Getto (Turin: UTET, 1949), 254: "Di Betulia la bella / vedovetta feroce / non ha lingua ne voce, e pur favella; / e par seco si glorij e voglia dire: / --Vedi s'io so ferire! / E di strale e di spada, / di due morti, fellon, vo che tu cada: / da me pria col bel viso, / poi con la forte man due volte ucciso" (The beautiful and fierce / young widow of Bethulia / has no tongue, nor voice, and yet speaks; / and she appears to exult in herself, and desires to say: / Behold that I know how to wound / Both from [love's] arrows, and from the sword / I inflicted two deaths upon you, felon: / First from my beautiful face, / next from the strong hand two times killed). Apart from the literary metaphors, there is, of course, the psychoanalytic association of decapitation and castration, first formulated in Sigmund Freud's 1922 essay "Medusa's Head"; see Marin, 144-49; and Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio's Secrels (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 85-99.

41. A thorough account of Michelangelo da Caravaggio's complex artistic relationship with the legacy of his namesake Michelangelo is in Hibbard (as in n. 2), 149-60, 264-67. On the figuration of Michelangelo and Tommaso de' Cavalieri in the Victory, see Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo, vol. 4. The Tomb of Julius II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 110-12; and Erwin Panofsky, "The Neoplatonic Movement and Michelangelo," in Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 218. It should be noted that the presumed period of Michelangelo's work on the statue and the dates of his correspondence with Cavalieri only slightly overlap, making claims of literal portraiture tenuous; see Howard Hibbard, Michelangelo (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 204. One of Michelangelo's sonnets to Cavalieri makes clear the conventional analogy of the lover vanquishing the beloved; see Michelangelo, The Poetry of Michelangelo, trans. James M. Saslow (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 226, no. 98: "Yet at least, if I cannot dodge the blow / I steal and rob from him--if it's ordained-- / then who will win out between sweetness and sorrow? / If, to be happy, I must be conquered and chained, / it is no wonder that, naked and alone, / an armed cavalier's prisoner I remain." The last line, "resto prigion d'un cavalier armato," is a pun on the youth's name. On the (platonically?) amorous relationship between Michelangelo and Cavalieri and its artistic consequences, see James M. Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 17-62; Christoph Frommel, Michelangelo und Tommaso dei Cavalieri (Amsterdam: Castrum Peregrini, 1979): and Bernard Faguet, L'ange et la bete: Michel-Ange et Cavalieri (Paris: Climates, 1998).

42. On the relationship of Caravaggio's self-portrait as Goliath to Michelangelo's self-portrayal as Saint Bartholomew's flayed skin, see Rottgen (as in n. 39), 206; and Poseq (as in n. 39), 173. On Michelangelo's disguised selfportrait as the flayed skin of Saint Bartholomew, its Neoplatonic significance as the corrupt husk of corporeal desire, and its artistic reference to the skin of the satyr Marsyas, flayed for audaciously comparing his bestial art to Apollonian purity, see Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 186-89; and, with further references, Bernardine Barnes, Michelangelo's Last Judgment: The Renaissance Response (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 105-7. Michelangelo wrote to Cavalieri: "I wish it were my own fate thus to clothe / my lord's living body with my dead hide, / so that, as a snake sheds its skin on a rock, / likewise through death could I change my condition"; Michelangelo (as in n. 41), 219, no. 94. On the confessional significance of the flayed skin, how it figures the spiritual inadequacy so often expressed in Michelangelo's poetry through the metaphor of the corrupt husk of the body, and how it conveys a longing for unworthy salvation at the moment the elect receive their spiritual bodies, see Leo Steinberg, "Michelangelo's 'Last Judgment' as Merciful Heresy," Art in America (1975): 52-53; and idem, "The Line of Fate in Michelangelo's Painting," in The Language of Images, ed. W. T. J. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 95-110.

43. Poseq (as in n. 39), 173. The Lysippian statue, known as the Apollo tortor, was in the collection of Caravaggio's patron Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani. Caravaggio's David is thus Apollonian, making the artist's inverse identification with Goliath all the more abject. The association of David and artistic potency, as well as with pensive withdrawal and melancholy, characterizes another of Caravaggio's artistic models, Giorgione's Self-Portrait as David; see Puglisi (as in n. 1), 360-62.

44. On Titian portraying himself as Midas, and how this signals a meditation on the divinity of art and human artistic judgment, notwithstanding the fact that Marsyas's flesh clearly embodies Titian's visceral painting technique, see Jaromir Neumann, Tizian: Die Schindung des Marsyas (Prague: Artia, 1962); and Augusto Gentili, Da Tiziano a Tiziano: Mito e allegoria nella cultura veneziano del cinquecento (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980), 147-58. On painting as skin and flesh in the Marsyas, see Paula Carabel, "Finito and Non-finito in Titian's Last Paintings," Res 28 (1995): 77-93. Not all scholars concur that a self-portrait is intended; see Philip Fehl, "The Punishment of Marsyas," in Decorum and Wit: The Poetry of Venetian Painting (Vienna: IRSA, 1992), 377.

45. When asked at the end of his life how he had achieved such stature among the great painters of Italy, Poussin replied, "Je n'ai rien neglige"; see Bonaventure d'Argonne, Melanges d'histoire et de litterature recueillis par M. de Vigneul-Marville (Rouen, 1699-1700), vol. 2, 140-41, reprinted in Thuillier, 209.

46. Charles Jouanny, ed., Le correspondance de Nicolas Poussin, Archives de I'Art Francais, 5 (Paris: H. Champion, 1911), 1-2, no. 1: "Ma judicando, che quel che Ella mi ha fatto, e stato, perche ell'e dotata di buona, nobile, e pietosa natura, mi sono assicurato ancora questa volta di scriverle questa presente, non potendo io medesimo venire a salutarla per amor d'un incomodita, che m'e intervenuta, per supplicarla di tutte le mie forze d'ajutarmi in qualche cosa, avendone di bisogna tanto, perche la piu parte del tempo io sono infermo, quanto che io non ho nessuna entrata per vivere, che il lavoro delle mie mani" (But judging that which you have done for me, and been for me, because you are endowed with a good, noble, and compassionate nature, I have assured myself yet again this time to write you this letter, not being able myself to come to greet you for cause of an indisposition that has overcome me, in order to entreat you with all my strength to help me out in some way, being in so much need, since I am sick for most of the time, and I have no other means to live than the labor of my hands). On the earlier dating of this letter, based on both Poussin's destitute financial situation and his reference to an "elephant," which likely refers to a very early painting, Hannibal Crossing the Alps, now in the Fogg Art Museum, see Turner (as in n. 33), 83-84; D. Mahon, Nicolas Poussin: Works from His First Years in Rome, exh. cat., Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1999, 21-24; and Francesco Solinas, "Poussin et Cassiano dal Pozzo: Notes et documents sur une collaboration amicale," in Merot, vol. 1, 293-94. The new dating of this letter has encouraged some to situate the British Museum portrait in 1626, far too early for its wearied features, in comparison with the youthful Bernini portrait; see J. Thuillier, Nicolas Poussin (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 108-9.

47. Passeri, 324-25.

48. Jouanny (as in n. 46), 23-25, nos. 12, 13 (Aug. 6 and Sept. 13, 1639). On the compounded suffering of the disease and the cures, he confides to Lemaire (24): "Mon miserable mal de carnosite n'est point guari, et j'ay poeur qu'il faudra retomber entre les mains des boureaux de chirurgiens devant que de me partir car de se acheminer par un long voyage et facheux avec telle maladie, se seroit aler chercher son malheur avec la chandelle" (my miserable affliction of fleshy growths is not at all cured, and I fear that it will be necessary to fall yet again into the hands of surgeon-torturers before leaving, since to undertake a long and tiresome voyage with such an illness, would be like going to meet one's misery with a candle).

49. Turner (as in n. 33), 83-84. He also notes it was far more likely that at this later date Camillo Massimi (b. 1620) would have been an amateur pupil of Poussin, as the inscription states. Oberhuber (as in n. 33), 233, 349, cat. no. D 177, upholds the inscription's date of 1630 based on stylistic evidence.

50. In 1628-29, Bernini and Poussin were in close contact regarding the commission for the Saint Erasmus altarpiece in St. Peter's; see Louise Rice, The Altarpieces of New Saint Peter's (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 228-29, cat. no. 10. On this period of 1628-29 as the most likely date of the portrait, see Mahon (as in n. 46), 37-38.

51. Erick Wilberding, "Poussin's Illness in 1629," Burlington Magazine 142 (2000): 561.

52. Though well known, Passeri's moving account merits quotation in full, 324-25: "ricevette un pensoso travaglio da un male di Francia che per qualche anno ne senti offese assai dolorose siche viveva con gran mortificazione, e pena. Haveva per sua buona sorte contratto amicizia in Roma con un suo paesano chiamato Giacomo Dughet il quale era Parigino, e questo che era huomo di gran bonta lo soveniva con grande amore et assiduita in tanta afflizione, e gli conduceva Medici e Chirurghi accioche lo sanassero, e non faceva mancargli ne diligenza di cura ne auito di nessuna sorte, anzi haveva ordinato alla propria moglie che gl'assistesse del continuo ne'suoi bisogni tanto per la cucina quanto in procurare di tenerlo pulito e provisto di biancheria, come ella faceva con gran diligenza et amore. Queste carezze di Giacomo e di sua moglie furono di gran sollievo a Nicolo, che Iddio sa come I'havesse passata senza questo soccorso, e glie ne confessava obbligo non ordinario. Haveva questo buon huomo cinque figliuoli, tre maschi, e due femmine le quali erano di maggior eta, et havendo finalmente ricuperata del tutto la sanitita prima per atto di gratitudine, e per non haver piu occasione di cadere in male somigliante gli chiese la sua figlia maggiore che chiamavasi Anna Maria per moglie, e questo fu nell'anno 1629" (He contracted a grave affliction of the French disease that for several years did him grievous harm, so that he was living with great humiliation and pain. He had, by good fortune, become friends in Rome with one of his countrymen named Jacques Dughet, who was Parisian. This man, being of saintly goodness, supported Poussin with great love and assiduousness during such affliction, and he brought doctors and surgeons in order that they might heal him. Dughet made sure that Poussin lacked no diligence of care nor help of any sort, in fact he ordered that his own wife continually assist him in his needs, as much in cooking, as in taking care to keep him clean and provided with linens, which she did with great diligence and love. These acts of kindness by Jacques and his wife were of great relief to Nicolas, and God only knows what would have happened to him without this assistance, and he confessed an extraordinary obligation to them. This good man had five children, three boys, and two girls who were of age, and having at long last recuperated all of his earlier health, as an act of gratitude, and to avoid any occasion for falling ill in a similar way, Poussin asked the eldest daughter, who was named Anne Marie, to be his wife, and this occurred in 1629). The marriage actually took place on September 19, 1630. On Poussin's illness and his relations with the Dughet family, see Thuillier (as in n. 46), 104-5, 133-41.

53. Passeri, 325: "Quello che egli hebbe di dote gli servi di stabilirsi una casa senza piu stare alle camere locande, e fermarsi di mente, e di stato et attendere di proposito alle sue studiose applicazioni" (That which he had as a dowry permitted him to settle in a house, sparing him from having to lodge in rented rooms any longer, and to firm up his mind, and his mental state, in order to attend to his studious pursuits in earnest).

54. Oberhuber (as in n. 33), 234-38.

55. "Poussin's Subject-Matter: Themes as Types," in Verdi, 1995, 22-27.

56. "Mavors Armipotens: The Poetics of Self-Representation in Poussin's Mars and Venus," in Cropper and Dempsey, 216-49. They refer to Montaigne's essay "Sur des vers de Virgile."

57. Verdi has compared Poussin's reforming life circumstances of about 1630 to the general theme of the triumph of reason over passion that Tasso applied to the wayward knights in his "Allegoria del poema," yet no connection has been made between the artist's recovery from disease and the specific narrative of Erminia curing Tancred; see Verdi, 1992, 28-30.

58. Marino befriended the young Poussin in Paris while he served in the court of Marie de Medicis until 1624. On Marino's repatriation, Poussin hitched his fortune to his famous protector's rising star and followed him to Rome. The importance of Marino for the development of Poussin's artistic thought and poetic sensibility was already recognized in the biographies written by his contemporaries; see Bellori, 425; and Passeri, 323. The relationship between Marino and Poussin has often been discussed in the Poussin literature, most recently and trenchantly in Cropper and Dempsey, 109-10, 253-78, where references to earlier studies can be found, of which I mention here only Robert Simon, "Poussin, Marino and the Interpretation of Mythology," Art Bulletin 60 (1978): 56-68. On Poussin's cultivation of the literary device of the metaphoric concetto, see Anthony Colantuono, "Interpreter Poussin: Metaphore, similarite et 'maniera magnifica,'" in Merot, vol. 2, 649-65; and more amply, idem, "The Tender Infant: Invenzione and Figura in the Art of Poussin," Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1986; and Cropper (as in n. 9), 76-95. On how Poussin consistently elected subject matter amenable to conceptual reinvention, see Charles Dempsey, "Sujets et themes dans la peinture de Poussin," in Rosenberg, 88-92. For the importance of Tasso's conceits, and especially his metaphors of beauty, for visualizing analogous lyrical subjects by artists such as Guido Reni, and the contemporary reception of their works in these terms, see Anthony Colantuono, Guido Reni's Abduction of Helen: The Politics and Rhetoric of Painting in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 64-77. On the development of the pictorial concello in Poussin's later works, see Jonathan Unglaub, "Poussin's Esther before Ahasuerus: Beauty, Majesty, Bondage," Art Bulletin 85 (2003): 114-36.

59. Tasso (as in n. 10), 14.66. On the poetic dynamics of the Dulwich Rinaldo and Armida, in which Poussin visualizes Tasso's conceit as well as its reinvention in the poetry of Marino and Ottavio Tronsarelli, see Jonathan Unglaub, Poussin, Tasso, and the Poetics of Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). This book is a comprehensive account of the crucial importance of Tasso's poetry and poetics for Poussin's theory of painting (which literally paraphrases Tasso's Discorsi on the epic poem) and a number of his important pictures, especially in the context of the reception of Tasso's legacy by Marino and other seicento poets. See also Giovanni Careri, "Mutazioni d'affetti, Poussin interprete del Tasso," in Poussin et Rome: Actes du colloque a l'Academie de France a Rome et a la Biblioteca Hertziana 16-19 novembre 1994, ed. Olivier Bonfait et al. (Paris: Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1996), 353-65.

60. Tasso, "Allegory of the Poem," in Jersualem Delivered, ed. and trans. Anthony M. Esolen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 416.

61. Ibid., 380 (19, 112-14).

62. For this sketch of the Duquesnoy bust, see Thuillier, 118; and Blunt (as in n. 18), 55.

63. On the Realm of Flora of 1630-31 and its patronage, see Rosenberg, 203-5, cat. no. 44; Verdi, 1995, 180-81, cat. no. 20; and Jane Costello, "The Twelve Pictures 'Ordered by Velasquez,' and the Trial of Valguarnera," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950): 237-84.

64. Honore de Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece, trans. Richard Howard (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), 29. Balzac's story takes place in 1612, when the eighteen-year-old Poussin first arrived in Paris, seeking the instruction of Frans Pourbus, court painter to Marie de Medicis. There, the artist is torn between the flawless beauty of his mistress, Gilette, and the elusive beauty of a supreme work of art, to which an eccentric aged painter, the fictive Frenhofer, had dedicated his life. Of course, in Balzac's parable of artistic creation, Poussin will ultimately forsake and betray his beloved to pursue his art, an artist's only true mistress. Intriguingly, Tancred and Erminia suggests that Poussin's life and art may have been indebted to the love and sustenance of Anne-Marie. On how 19th-century painters and writers constructed fables on Poussin's biography, including his love life, in order to confer his authority, as the founder of the French school, on their own aesthetic agendas, see Marc Gotlieb, "Poussin's Lesson: Representing Representation in the Romantic Age," Word and Image 16 (2000): 124-43.

65. On the interrelation of melancholy, disease, and the artistic temperament, as illustrated in Durer's Melancholia I of 1514, see Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz-Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 284-373. Referring to the pose of Durer's figure, they observe that the gesture of the cheek resting on the hand dates back to ancient funerary reliefs and denotes both grief and suffering, as well as the fatigue occasioned by creative meditation. The clenched fist signifies both disease and "fanatical concentration" (286-87, 319).

Frequently Cited Sources

Bellori, Giovanni Pietro, Le vite de' pittori, scultori, et architetti moderni (Rome, 1672), ed. Evelina Borea (Turin: Einaudi, 1976).

Cropper, Elizabeth, and Charles Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

Marin, Louis, To Destroy Painting, trans. Mette Hjort (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

Merot, Alain, ed., Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665): Actes du colloque organise au Musee du Louvre par le Service Culturel, du 19 au 21 octobre 1994, 2 vols. (Paris: La Documentation Francaise, 1996).

Passeri, Giovanni Battista, Vite de' pittori, scultori, ed architetti, reprinted in Jacob Hess, ed., Die Kunstlerbiographien nach den Handschriften des Autors (Leipzig: H. Keller, 1934).

Rosenberg, Pierre, Nicolas Poussin 1594-1665, exh, cat., Grand Palais, Paris, 1994.

Stoichita, Victor, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, trans. A. M. Glasheen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Thuillier, Jacques, Nicolas Poussin (Paris: Flammarion, 1994).

Verdi, Richard, 1992, Tancred and Erminia, exh. cat., Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

_______, 1995, Nicolas Poussin, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Jonathan Unglaub (Ph.D., Columbia) teaches at Brandeis University. Current book projects include Poussin, Tasso, and the Poetics of Painting (Cambridge University Press) and a monograph on Poussin for Phaidon's Art and Ideas series [Department of Fine Arts, Brandeis University, Mail Stop 028, Waltham, Mass. 02454].

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