Examples from the Masters

Poussin is for me the greatest painter of mythical figures in landscape, dramatizing the narrative enacted by the figures, and finding the landscape – often a sweeping panorama – to provide the perfect place for  the action. He had a great range of subjects from Biblical and classical mythology. I remember especially two versions of   “Et in Arcadia Ego”  — the shepherds at the tomb, discovering death in paradise. One version was full of areas of light and shadow, dramatizing space and movement in what seemed a real outdoors. The second was a formal arrangement with balancing figures on either side.

On the subject of  Dionysos, Poussin did a “Bacchanalia,”    a rather formal dance composed with balanced figures.  The dancing Bacchantes are related to the Dionysian Maenads (“manic” women) as Bacchus is to Dionysos — both gods of wine, and interchangeable.  Bacchus is the Latin name for him, used by Ovid, the poet who was the source for Poussin’s series of paintings on the infancy of Bacchus. And Bacchus was the name of the same god in Titian’s painting of him  as a beautiful youth arriving with his retinue on the island of Naxos to claim Ariadne as his bride.

The later Roman empire attempted to suppress many expressions of popular religion (early Christianity is one example) and Bacchanalia, which had begun as mystical initiations, but had become public orgies, were officially proscribed by the Senate. Thus in later European tradition Bacchus became a drunken, fat old man, a god of inebriation. But as the Greek  Dionysos, he was slender, even effeminate, and much more a god of life than of drinking.

Another painting: Rubens’ allegory of Ixion,  an intruder in the Olympian court, shows him in a dark corner making love to  his fantasy of Hera, while the real Hera (who has put this spell on him) looks on from the reality of daylight. I studied this painting in the Louvre for a long time, for the contrast of light on bodies in light and shadow.

Here is another Rubens altarpiece in Germany that I have only seen in reproduction. It is “The Fall of the Damned,”  a tumult of figures in a diagonal cascade. Some of them have the abandoned, ecstatic or exhausted postures I have in mind.

Another inspiration was a gallery exhibit of paintings by Yuriy Ibragimov whose nudes appeared in an atmosphere of palette-knife dashes and daubs that looked like many-colored leaves. This discovery of a figure in a forest, partly obscured and shadowed by foreground paint, provided another tool of composition – a way to show depth in addition to light and perspective.

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