Nicolas Poussin: Dialectics of Painting

About this book

In this highly original and innovative study of Nicolas Poussin one of seventeenth-century Europes greatest artists Oskar Batschmann presents a series of connected studies that offer new ways of interpreting the work and ideas of this brilliant and complex figure. This superbly illustrated book is a polemical challenge in a field of art-historical research that has often lost its way in insoluble disputes and erudite details. "Like Poussins paintings this is a highly polished work. In prose of great elegance Batschmann achieves an almost perfect balance between exposition and polemic."Times Literary Supplement "This is a tough but rewarding book focusing not so much on the context of Poussins book its extrinsic framework but intently on the work itself and the attitude of Poussin to his subject-matter from history painting to the holy family and what Batschmann calls tragic landscape."The Sunday Times