by John Berger
Consider the two earliest battle scenes of Joshua’s army, painted when Poussin was thirty. Their turmoil is controlled. They are not seen in terms of the total chaos of the protagonist’s view: they are seen in terms of the modified chaos of the safe eye-witness.
Ten years later, in the first whirling Rape of the Sabines, everything has been placed in the ordered perspective of history. Everything which is included has been made significant. Thus – though flesh is still flesh – the Romans and the Sabines become gods, incapable of triviality.
Ten years later again – in the late 1640s – Poussin’s power becomes complete. He can now go to the centre of the most undramatic incident – a quiet marriage, a baptism, a man walking through a landscape – and so arrange the elements of the scene as to give it a charge, a significance far greater than he gave to the whole of Joshua’s army.
Yet with this power to organize, this mastery, came anxiety. How is it that in Poussin, of all artists, you can glimpse the horror and fears that were later to seize and drive Goya onwards? I don’t want to exaggerate. You can only just glimpse this. It is no more than a nagging doubt, a cloud no larger than a man’s hand on the horizon.
The turning point was about 1648, the year he painted the Dulwich Roman Road. He tries desperately to keep everything under control: he emphasizes the straight edge of the man-made road, he makes as much as he can of the calculated angles of the church roof, he disposes the small figures in their telling, clear poses, but the evening light making shadow chase shadow, the sun going down behind the hills, the awaited night – these are too much for him. Beyond the town walls, beyond the circle of learning, there is a threat.
From 1648 onwards the light suggests the light which precedes a thunderstorm. The sharply defined leaves of the trees seem to cover the eyes of the landscapes, blinding them. It is as though Poussin began to be horrified at the inertia of the earth.
Clouds become a reminder of smoke. There are literally snakes in the grass, and more than one of his figures falls victim to a hidden serpent. The giant Orion stalks across a landscape, himself blind, the dead tree-roots at his feet like frogs. Other giants too appear, questioning the world of reason and proportion. From where do they come? In the foreground of painting after painting there is dark water, as though to suggest that there is an edge, a limit, to what can be ordered, and that around the edge reflections and illusions are seeping.
Much else continues as before: the same marvellously calculated theorems of colour, blue with the gold of white wine, blazon red with copse green; the same appropriateness of gesture to emotion; the same unity of figures and landscape; the same pastoral spaces. I speak only of a hint. But just once this hint is made dreadfully explicit.
There is the terrible contrast in ‘The Four Seasons’ between the canvases of Summer and Winter. It is as terrible a contrast as that in the Sistine Chapel between Michelangelo’s ceiling and his Last Judgement painted twenty-five years later. Summer, surely one of the richest paintings in the world, is as life-affirming as the golden loaf of bread suggested by its predominant colour. Winter, which also represents The Deluge, is ash-coloured and so withered in all its forms that its composition becomes purely linear and gothic – a phenomenon to be found nowhere else in Poussin’s work. Clearly these two pictures are far more than a comment on the two seasons. If such a winter ends such a summer, some spectre of haunting futility has been met and not been exorcised. What was this spectre for Poussin, Poussin the man of rule and classic continuity, on whose example all the assured academies have been based?
Was it simply the spectre of his own ageing? When he was in his thirties he borrowed from Veronese and Titian to find the means to express his own intense sexuality. There are muses and goddesses in his early work that look forward towards Renoir. Venus lies in a wood among red and white draperies. When the satyrs pull these off, her body is revealed as a blushing infusion and marriage of the two colours. By the time Poussin was in his fifties syphilis had undercut his faculties. The lines in his late drawings are as wavy as embroidered stitches. In 1665 he wrote: ‘I have nothing to do now except die: that is the only cure for the ills that afflict me.’
Was the spectre the disease in his own body? Partly, I think, but not entirely. Many earlier artists had suffered protracted illnesses, but one does not find in their work the same nagging anxiety. Horror and tragedy – yes. But not this latent disquiet which the confident can even ignore. The self-portrait of 1650 reveals the same thing. The pinched face of a proud, courageous, determined man who would like to know a little less than he does. It is not that he has a guilty secret of his own. The anxiety is not personal Angst. It is the price paid for a particular and new kind of opportunity.
The late 1640s were a critical period politically. Charles I was tried and executed. Civil war broke out in France. Nearer Poussin in Rome, there was the plebeian insurrection in Naples, led by Masaniello. The days of absolutism were being numbered. Poussin wrote: ‘It is a great pleasure to live in an age when such great things are happening, provided one can tuck oneself away in some quiet corner and watch the Comedy at leisure.’ Did the spectre arise out of these events or their shadows? Again, perhaps partly. But I cannot help believing that the most profound historical parallel is less direct.
Descartes was born in 1596, two years after Poussin. The Cartesian division between the soul of the observer and the world around him made the division between mind and matter more final than ever before. Nature becomes the ‘dead matter’ that can be organized by the natural sciences. The individual soul becomes private. Philosophical reasoning begins on the basis of doubt. In his own field had not Poussin reached the same threshold?
Look at the Arcadian Shepherds painted in 1650. The three men decipher an inscription on a tomb they have just come across. The woman bows her head in reflection. Landscape and figures are one. The angle of the mountain above the tomb is the same as that of the elbow of the kneeling shepherd. The boughs grow out of the woman as though she were a dryad. Nothing has been overlooked. Within the arrangement of the three shepherds, there are wheels within wheels. The first circle inscribes the kneeling shepherd – leaving aside the kneeling leg on the ground. The second, larger circle is bounded by the standing shepherd’s outstretched arm. The third circle surrounds all four figures. Each circle re-emphasizes the curved shadow of the reader’s arm on the tomb: each circle, as it revolves, draws attention to the finger following the inscription. The inscription reads: Et in Arcadia Ego.
This phrase was an early seventeenth-century invention. It is first found not in literature but in a painting by Poussin’s contemporary Guercino. Unlike a typical medieval inscription – ‘Though now food for worms, I was formerly known as a painter’ – it is not about the process of Death, awaiting all; it is about an individual being taken out of his environment, which is indifferent to his departure, which continues as though he had never been there.
In the painting every material form is ordered and put in its proper place. But the centre of the picture is less than a shadow. There is the shepherd who reads, then there is his shadow, and beyond that, inside the tomb, there is nothing. There is only written evidence of a presence, now departed.
I am not suggesting that Poussin deliberately painted a philosophic allegory. I am not even suggesting that he read Descartes. We have no evidence that he did. What I am suggesting is that Poussin reached in his own art a degree of order and control such as the natural sciences were to reach as a result of the Cartesian division; but that, having reached this, he became uneasy about the limitations of this control. He was haunted by the spectre of Time: that Time, crueller than any experienced before, which was rushing into the new gulf cut between mind and matter. That Time which rendered Vermeer – with his very different temperament – calmly sceptical.
It is no coincidence that Cézanne went back to Poussin as a starting point, for Cézanne’s art was the first to try to rebridge the gulf.
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The Maja Dressed and The Maja Undressed
Goya
First, she lies there on the couch in her fancy-dress costume: the costume which is the reason for her being called a Maja. Later, in the same pose, and on the same couch, she is naked.
Ever since the paintings were first hung in the Prado at the beginning of this century, people have asked: who is she? Is she the Duchess of Alba? A few years ago the body of the Duchess of Alba was exhumed and her skeleton measured in the hope that this would prove that it was not she who had posed! But then, if not she, who?
One tends to dismiss the question as part of the trivia of court gossip. But then when one looks at the two paintings there is indeed a mystery implied by them which fascinates. But the question has been wrongly put. It is not a question of who? We shall never know, and if we did we would not be much the wiser. It is a question of why? If we could answer that we might learn a little more about Goya.
My own explanation is that nobody posed for the nude version. Goya constructed the second painting from the first. With the dressed version in front of him, he undressed her in his imagination and put down on the canvas what he imagined. Look at the evidence.
There is the uncanny identity (except for the far leg) of the two poses. This can only have been the result of an idea: ‘Now I will imagine her clothes are not there.’ In actual poses, taken up on different occasions, there would be bound to be greater variation.
More important, there is the drawing of the nude, the way the forms of her body have been visualized. Consider her breasts – so rounded, high and each pointing outwards. No breasts, when a figure is lying, are shaped quite like that. In the dressed version we find the explanation. Bound and corseted, they assume exactly that shape and, supported, they will retain it even when the figure is lying. Goya has taken off the silk to reveal the skin, but has forgotten to reckon with the form changing.
The same is true of her upper arms, especially the near one. In the nude it is grotesquely, if not impossibly, fat – as thick as the thigh just above the knee. Again, in the dressed version we see why. To find the outline of a naked arm Goya has had to guess within the full, pleated shoulders and sleeves of her jacket, and has miscalculated by merely simplifying instead of reassessing the form.
Compared to the dressed version, the far leg in the nude has been slightly turned and brought towards us. If this had not been done, there would have been a space visible between her legs and the whole boat-like form of her body would have been lost. Then, paradoxically, the nude would have looked less like the dressed figure. Yet if the leg were really moved in this way, the position of both hips would change too. And what makes the hips, stomach and thighs of the nude seem to float in space – so that we cannot be certain at what angle they are to the bed – is that, although the far leg has been shifted, the form of the near hip and thigh has been taken absolutely directly from the clothed body, as though the silk there was a mist that had suddenly lifted.
Indeed the whole near line of her body as it touches the pillows and sheet, from armpit to toe, is as unconvincing in the nude as it is convincing in the first painting. In the first, the pillows and the couch sometimes yield to the form of the body, sometimes press against it: the line where they meet is like a stitched line – the thread disappearing and reappearing. Yet the line in the nude version is like the frayed edge of a cut-out, with none of this ‘give-and-take’ which a figure and its surroundings always establish in reality.
The face of the nude jumps forward from the body, not because it has been changed or painted afterwards (as some writers have suggested), but because it has been seen instead of conjured up. The more one looks at it, the more one realizes how extraordinarily vague and insubstantial the naked body is. At first its radiance deceives one into thinking that this is the glow of flesh. But is it not really closer to the light of an apparition? Her face is tangible. Her body is not.
Goya was a supremely gifted draughtsman with great powers of invention. He drew figures and animals in action so swift that clearly he must have drawn them without reference to any model. Like Hokusai, he knew what things looked like almost instinctively. His knowledge of appearances was contained in the very movement of his fingers and wrist as he drew. How then is it possible that the lack of a model for this nude should have made his painting unconvincing and artificial?
The answer, I think, has to be found in his motive for painting the two pictures. It is possible that both paintings were commissioned as a new kind of scandalous trompe l’oeil – in which in the twinkling of an eye a woman’s clothes disappeared. Yet at that stage of his life Goya was not the man to accept commissions on other men’s trivial terms. So if these pictures were commissioned, he must have had his own subjective reasons for complying.
What then was his motive? Was it, as seemed obvious at first, to confess or celebrate a love affair? This would be more credible if we could believe that the nude had really been painted from life. Was it to brag of an affair that had not in fact taken place? This contradicts Goya’s character; his art is unusually free from any form of bravado. I suggest that Goya painted the first version as an informal portrait of a friend (or possibly mistress), but that as he did so he became obsessed by the idea that suddenly, as she lay there in her fancy dress looking at him, she might have no clothes on.
Why ‘obsessed’ by this? Men are always undressing women with their eyes as a quite casual form of make-believe. Could it be that Goya was obsessed because he was afraid of his own sexuality?
There is a constant undercurrent in Goya which connects sex with violence. The witches are born of this. And so, partly, are his protests against the horrors of war. It is generally assumed that he protested because of what he witnessed in the hell of the Peninsular War. This is true. In all conscience he identified himself with the victims. But with despair and horror he also recognized a potential self in the torturers.
The same undercurrent blazes as ruthless pride in the eyes of the women he finds attractive. Across the full, loose mouths of dozens of faces, including his own, it flickers as a taunting provocation. It is there in the charged disgust with which he paints men naked, always equating their nakedness with bestiality – as with the madmen in the madhouse, the Indians practising cannibalism, the priests awhoring. It is present in the so-called ‘Black’ paintings which record orgies of violence. But most persistently it is evident in the way he painted all flesh.
It is difficult to describe this in words, yet it is what makes nearly every Goya portrait unmistakably his. The flesh has an expression of its own – as features do in portraits by other painters. The expression varies according to the sitter, but it is always a variation on the same demand: the demand for flesh as food for an appetite. Nor is that a rhetorical metaphor. It is almost literally true. Sometimes the flesh has a bloom on it like fruit. Sometimes it is flushed and hungry-looking, ready to devour. Usually – and this is the fulcrum of his intense psychological insight – it suggests both simultaneously: the devourer and the to-be-devoured. All Goya’s monstrous fears are summed up in this. His most horrific vision is of Satan eating the bodies of men.
One can even recognize the same agony in the apparently mundane painting of the butcher’s table. I know of no other still life in the world which so emphasizes that a piece of meat was recently living, sentient flesh, which so combines the emotive with the literal meaning of the word ‘butchery’. The terror of this picture, painted by a man who has enjoyed meat all his life, is that it is not a still life.
If I am right in this, if Goya painted the nude Maja because he was haunted by the fact that he imagined her naked – that is to say imagined her flesh with all its provocation – we can begin to explain why the painting is so artificial. He painted it to exorcise a ghost. Like the bats, dogs and witches, she is another of the monsters released by ‘the sleep of reason’, but, unlike them, she is beautiful because desirable. Yet to exorcise her as a ghost, to call her by her p
roper name, he had to identify her as closely as possible with the painting of her dressed. He was not painting a nude. He was painting the apparition of a nude within a dressed woman. This is why he was tied so faithfully to the dressed version and why his usual powers of invention were so unusually inhibited.
I am not suggesting that Goya intended us to interpret the two paintings in this way. He expected them to be taken at their face value: the woman dressed and the woman undressed. What I am suggesting is that the second, nude version was probably an invention and that perhaps Goya became imaginatively and emotionally involved in its ‘pretence’ because he was trying to exorcise his own desires.
Why do these two paintings seem surprisingly modern? We assumed that the painter and model were lovers when we took it for granted that she agreed to pose for the two pictures. But their power, as we now see it, depends upon there being so little development between them. The difference is only that she is undressed. This should change everything, but in fact it only changes our way of looking at her. She herself has the same expression, the same pose, the same distance. All the great nudes of the past offer invitations to share their golden age; they are naked in order to seduce and transform us. The Maja is naked but indifferent. It is as though she is not aware of being seen – as though we were peeping at her secretly through a keyhole. Or rather, more accurately, as though she did not know that her clothes had become ‘invisible’.
In this, as in much else, Goya was prophetic. He was the first artist to paint the nude as a stranger: to separate sex from intimacy: to substitute an aesthetic of sex for an energy of sex. It is in the nature of energy to break bounds: and it is the function of aesthetics to construct them. Goya, as I have suggested, may have had his own reason for fearing energy. In the second half of the twentieth century the aestheticism of sex helps to keep a consumer society stimulated, competitive and dissatisfied.