French Baroque Era Painter, 1606-1656   Related Paintings of LA HIRE, Laurent de :. | Theseus and Aethra (detail sg | Landscape with Peace and Justice Embracing st | The Militia Company of Captain Allaert Cloeck | Laban Searching Jacob's Bagagge for the Stolen Idols sg | Allegorical Figure of Grammar sg |
Related Artists:
John Liston Byam Shaw
1872-1919
Baciccio
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1639-1709 Baciccia Giovanni Battista Gaulli
POUSSIN, Nicolas
French Baroque Era Painter, 1594-1665 French painter and draughtsman, active in Italy. His supreme achievement as a painter lies in his unrivalled but hard-won capacity to subordinate dramatic narrative and the expression of extreme states of human passions to the formal harmony of designs based on the beauty and precision of abstract forms. The development of his art towards this end was focused on the search for a point of equilibrium and synthesis between the forces of the Classical and the Baroque around which most critical debate in Rome was concentrated during the 1630s. Poussin did not aspire to the classicism of Raphael's idealized human forms or Michelangelo's re-embodiment of the physical splendours of the antique world, nor did he attempt to vie with the bravura and energy of Annibale Carracci's treatment of Classical mythology in the Galleria of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Equally he was not concerned with the illusionistic effects and heightened emotionalism of Baroque artists such as Pietro da Cortona and Lanfranco. He was concerned above all with interpreting his subject-matter, whether Classical or religious, and telling a story with the greatest possible concentration of emotional response,