Louis Marin, Poussin and the Sublime

Nigel Saint

Louis Marin’s work on Nicolas Poussin extended from his first book Études sémiologiques:
Écritures, peintures (1971) through Détruire la peinture (1977) to Sublime Poussin (1995),
published three years after his death at the age of sixty-two. This article will argue
for the importance of the second decade of this work, when Marin wrote a dozen
articles and papers on Poussin, drawing up a plan for a book in 1988. As it happened,
work on Philippe de Champaigne ou la présence cachée (1995), Des Pouvoirs de l’image (1993) and
Lectures traversières (1992) took precedence over the completion of the projected work
on Poussin. My article will focus on the articles and papers published by Marin’s
executors and editors as Sublime Poussin, as well as his contribution to the collective
volume Du Sublime.1 I will recapitulate aspects of Marin’s earlier work on Poussin
before discussing the context and principal elements of Marin’s interpretation of
certain landscapes in relation to the sublime. I will then turn to the topics that Marin
connected to Poussin and the sublime, namely the concept of variation and the
representation of ruins and time.
Although it probably used to be true that, as Elizabeth Cropper and Charles
Dempsey stated in 1996 in Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting, Marin’s 1970s
work on Poussin’s Arcadian Shepherds (Paris: Musée du Louvre) was ‘little understood’,
there has been some critically sophisticated engagement with Marin’s work in
many of the monographs on Poussin published since the anniversary exhibitions of
1994–95.2 Initially Marin anchored his interpretations of a small number of Poussin’s
paintings – mainly The Arcadian Shepherds, Landscape with a man killed by a snake (London:
National Gallery) and The Israelites Gathering Manna (Paris: Musée du Louvre) – in a
reading of their structures, looking at how the organization of the space, the deictical
arrangement of figures and the representation of textual sources could be read in
the context of seventeenth-century theories of language and signs, artistic theory
since the Renaissance and twentieth-century linguistics and philosophy. Across his
work, not only on Poussin but also on Champaigne, representations of Louis XIV and
seventeenth-century literature and thought, Marin draws art historians’ attention
to a number of dualities in visual representation: that a representation always both
Detail from Nicolas Poussin,
The Israelites Gathering represents and shows itself to be in the act of representing, is both transparent and
Manna, 1639 (plate 2). reflexive;3 that a representation addresses and constitutes the subjectivity of the
spectator, whether directly or by staging the process; that representation will always
DOI:
10.1111/j.1467-8365.2011.00853.x refer in some way to the absence of its original referent, so that presence is never fully
Art History | ISSN 0141-6790 restored and representation is marked by its fallibility; and that, at the same time,
34 | 5 | November 2011 | pages
914-933 a representation can be very powerful, because it converts a story or subject into

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Louis Marin, Poussin and the Sublime

something both different and alike.4 Using the rhetorical figure of chiasmus, Marin
enhances the potential for analysing paintings in two ways at the same time: looking
at the way a scene is represented; and at the way the represented scene presents itself
to the spectator.
In focusing on the mechanics and theoretical foundations of representation,
Marin’s work was less concerned with revolutionizing history than Michel Foucault’s,
remaining located in the works under discussion and foregoing general discussions
about the classical episteme (although he does refer to Foucault’s work on this
concept5 ). However, Roger Chartier noted that Marin’s work on representation’s
dualities meant that he wasn’t a semiotician who ignored historicity and that in fact
he helped historians consider both the way institutions established their power
and the efficacy of representations.6 Marin didn’t comment on Foucault’s analysis
of Las Meninas by Velázquez, but while there are similarities in their approaches,
it is doubtful that he followed Foucault in seeing the painting as a ‘pure’, entirely
self-sufficient representation, that ultimately bypassed the art of Velázquez in its
exemplification of the shift from the classical to the modern episteme.7
Marin certainly didn’t see himself as a historian of ideas. In a 1983 essay for an
English volume on contemporary French philosophy, he recounted an anecdote about
a visit to Oxford.8 As Assistant Director of the French Institute in London (1964–
67), Marin found himself accompanying ‘a renowned French philosopher’ (Jules
Vuillemin) on a visit to All Souls. He was quizzed at lunch by a ‘highly renowned
English philosopher’ (the anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard) about his work
and asked to specify which area of philosophy he worked in. On replying that he
worked on French philosophy of the seventeenth century, he was told, ‘I see: you are
a historian of ideas.’ It would have taken him too long to explain why he in fact saw
himself instead as a philosopher and critical reader of philosophy, art and literature.
He operated at the level of the theoretical and practical questions opened up by the
objects of culture themselves, and also sought to avoid the application of a theoretical
model of his own.9
His early work on Poussin resulted in his well-known study of Poussin and
Caravaggio, Détruire la peinture, where the Poussin section is devoted to The Arcadian
Shepherds (plate 1), a painting Marin considered to be a key example of the theory and
practice of representation.10 Taking up the topic of transitivity and reflexivity again,
Marin argued that classical representation sought to depict a story in a rational,
objectively valid way, while at the same time engaging with the spectator and making
the narrative intelligible. He was struck, however, by the way in which the spectator
seemed excluded from The Arcadian Shepherds, since the viewing and vanishing points
have been displaced into the centre of the depicted tomb:

None of the figures looks beyond the painting at me, not even to ‘position’ me
in the place of the painter as a seeing eye or theoretical subject and thereby
to designate and constitute a space of contemplation, the enchanted circuit
involving what might be called the painting’s gaze and the viewer’s eye.11

Contrasting his approach with Erwin Panofsky’s interpretation of the inscription

in the context of the myth of Arcadia, Marin went on to demonstrate how a
consideration of space, staging and action led him to propose an allegorical
reading of the figures on the far left and far right, and ultimately of the painting as
a whole. Inspired by Benveniste, he examined the way enunciation works in the
painting, looking especially at the possible meanings of the ‘ego’ in the inscription.

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Nigel Saint

1 Nicolas Poussin, The However, he avoided stating which meaning had to prevail, noting nevertheless
Arcadian Shepherds, 1639.
Oil on canvas, 85 × 121 cm. how the ‘ego’ is caught between the past and the present, and between memory and
Paris: Musée du Louvre. interpretation.12 Détruire la peinture thus proposed a verbal and visual logic of looking,
Photo: Réunion des Musées
Nationaux. reading, communication and commemoration. The view of representation that
emerged in this study of Poussin was of a carefully regulated system of storytelling,
understanding and framing, which at the same time recognized the impossibility
of recovering Arcadia, except as a representation.13 Marin’s later work on the artist,
which has received less attention, sought to develop his analyses of the system of
representation in operation in Poussin’s paintings by investigating further its limits,
its pressure points and its margins.14
In order to illustrate how Marin’s thinking about Poussin was developing in
relation to his earlier work, the editors of Sublime Poussin include two ‘bridging’
essays: one from 1970, ‘La description de l’image: à propos d’un paysage de Poussin’
(35–70), devoted to Landscape with a man killed by a snake; and, for the opening essay
(11–34), a return in 1983 to The Israelites Gathering Manna (plate 2), which develops work
on the painting in Études sémiologiques, in an article of 1972 and in Détruire la peinture.15
His new interpretation reconsidered the letter Poussin wrote to one of his friends
and patrons, Paul Fréart de Chantelou, when sending him the finished commission,
recommending that he ‘read the story and the painting’ (229) [‘lisez l’histoire
et le tableau’ (226)].16 In Marin’s analysis, the letter encourages a combination of
contemplation and reading, looking at the arrangement of the figures and the space,
and studying the painting’s relation to the original story from Exodus. He focuses
on the relationship between the seven figures in the front left, principally the man

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admiring the scene of charity before him, who can be seen as a representative for
the spectator, and the remaining figures, organized around Moses and Aaron in
the middle distance. In Marin’s view, the absence of Moses’s horns and rod means
that Moses is yet to be named in the story, and the painting, through gesture and
prolepsis, can be considered to look ahead to the culmination of the provision of
nourishment and Law in the spiritual nourishment of the Eucharist.
The spectator passes from the visible signs of charity to the miracle of the manna
and seeks to understand what is happening; manna is derived from the Hebrew
‘mann-hu’ or ‘what is that?’ This interpretation can be read as a development of
Anthony Blunt’s interest in the painting’s ‘alphabet of gesture’17 – though Blunt is not
mentioned by name in the essay – and as a new emphasis in Marin’s work on seeking
to connect what is framed within the representation to that which is not contained
there, in this case the source of the manna. On the basis of the prolepsis detected
in the painting, therefore, Marin suggests that the question of thinking beyond the
frame results in the Eucharistic response from outside the representation: ‘this is
my body’. Marin considers that Poussin therefore challenges Chantelou, a ‘scholarly
Christian humanist’ (26) [‘chrétien[s] savant[s] humaniste[s]’ (32)], to interpret his
injunction to ‘read the story and the painting’. Likewise this essay, placed at the start
2 Nicolas Poussin, The of Sublime Poussin, points the reader’s attention towards the main drama of the volume,
Israelites Gathering Manna,
1639. Oil on canvas, 149 × 200 the theory of the sublime in painting.
cm. Paris: Musée du Louvre. Blunt is referred to twice in Détruire la peinture and several times in Études sémiologiques,
Photo: Réunion des Musées
Nationaux. during the essay on Philippe de Champaigne and Port-Royal, where Marin mentions

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Nigel Saint

discussing a particular point with Blunt in person.18 Marin met Blunt when he
worked at the French Institute in London; he is the only French poststructuralist to
have spent an extended period in the UK. In addition to Blunt, Marin engages in
Sublime Poussin with the work of Panofsky and Edgar Wind, while French art historians
of the same generation do not abound: there are two references to Jacques Thuillier,
on Poussin’s landscapes (254 n. 18 / 132 n. 4) and on Fragonard (251 n. 33 / 123
n. 1). Marin’s more expansive French references are to André Félibien (passim) and
Hubert Damisch (256 n. 42 / 141 n. 1).
Explicit or implicit connections with Blunt may be made throughout Sublime
Poussin, particularly in view of the mention of Blunt in a footnote to his paper of 1984,
‘The Classical Sublime: “Tempests” in some Landscapes by Poussin’ (120–40). There
Marin points to Blunt’s ‘indispensable’ work, especially the later chapters of his study
of Poussin, when discussing the artist’s role in the change in the status of landscape
painting, to which he adds the following:

Still, in my view only the questioning that the sublime introduces makes it
possible to interpret this sublation (relève) [of landscape painting], particularly
through the figures of the ‘formless’ (l’informe), the ‘giant’, the ‘snake’,
and the ‘tempest’. The task that remains, then, is to rearticulate Blunt’s
impressive work through a new problematic that would be at once historical,
iconographic, and philosophical but also formal and plastic. (253 n. 13)19

By using the terms ‘relève’ and ‘informe’, keywords borrowed respectively from
Hegel (via Jacques Derrida) and Georges Bataille, Marin is declaring an interest in
opening up Poussin’s art, and Blunt’s conception of the painter-philosopher, to wide-
ranging theoretical and critical scrutiny.
‘Relève’ poses problems for the reader and translator as it is Derrida’s translation
of Hegel’s term ‘Aufhebung’, which has always been difficult to translate in one word.
‘Aufhebung’ means revocation, seizure and neutralization, while Hegel, in Derrida’s
view, used the term to include lifting up, substitution and alteration. Derrida
felt that he could recover these meanings in ‘relève’, drawing on the polysemy
of the verb ‘relever’, and the translator of his Marges: de la philosophie argues that as a
result ‘sublation’, though the original English translation for Hegel’s term, misses
something of Derrida’s reading of Hegel.20 Marin, a contemporary and colleague
of Derrida, used the German term in his 1980 article ‘Toward a Theory of Reading
in the Visual Arts’ to refer to the change that occurs to way in which the event in
the painting is represented, namely the apparent exclusion of the spectator and the
concentration on a self-contained scene of reading and decipherment.21 In his 1984
paper ‘The Classical Sublime’, Marin has this special use of ‘relève’ in mind as he uses
it several times at one stage in his article (123) and argues that a particular change
occurs in the ambition and scope of landscape painting on account of the figure of the
storm and its presentation of the sublime during a period that comprises Giorgione’s
Tempest, Leonardo da Vinci’s Floods and Poussin’s illustrations to Leonardo’s Treatise on
Painting, and leads up to Poussin’s landscapes, Félibien and the question of Longinus’s
On the Sublime (121–4 / 128–32).
The ‘informe’, meanwhile, is the term Bataille uses to refer to the task of
critiquing idealized form by reconsidering disturbing or abject objects and images.22
Marin employs it here to indicate the significance he attributes to figures of
disruption in Poussin’s paintings. The plan of 1988 has these figures as ‘the tempest
in landscapes’ (storms but also Winter from the Four Seasons [Louvre]), ‘the colossal or

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the shock of ostentation’ (combining ruins, giants and snakes) and ‘violence or the
absolute of force’ (the ‘formless’, comprising plague, war, rape and death).23 There
were also to be four counterpoint sections or ‘digressions’, building on the two
previous essays on the works by Giorgione and Leonardo already mentioned, a third
on Dante, Hegel and the Tower of Babel in relation to Landscape during a Thunderstorm with
Pyramus and Thisbe (Frankfurt am Main: Städel Museum), and a fourth that discussed
the figure of Medusa and time.24 The evidence was being assembled to permit a
rethink of the ambition of Poussin’s landscapes, moving away from the cosmology
and mythology of Blunt to an interpretation based on the power and limitations
of representation. In his essay on Panofsky and Poussin, Marin states that he sees
the work of his own generation of thinkers who have come to art history and
theory from a background in philosophy, aesthetics and the sociology of culture,
as the resumption and critique of Panofsky’s foundational and Kantian work on the
interpretation of art.25 Marin names Damisch, but also has in mind Pierre Bourdieu,
Derrida, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn and Jean-Louis Schefer. The theoretical context
Marin places himself in is ‘post-Panofskian’ (108) and seeing how he differs from
both Blunt and Panofsky in his approach to one artist, Poussin, allows us to see this
newly forged theory in practice.26
In Marin’s view, with a certain corpus of paintings by Poussin it is difficult for the
spectator to embrace the whole of the spectacle being presented. Marin sought to align
the features of the sublime presented in the first-century CE Greek treatise on poetry
and oratory, On the Sublime (Peri hypsous), attributed to Longinus, with the effects of the
storms represented by Poussin. On the Sublime was translated into Latin and Italian in the
sixteenth century and into French in the following century, notably in 1674 by Nicolas
Boileau.27 Adopting a Kantian perspective, Marin drew on the close relationship
between the reproductive imagination of mimesis and the productive imagination
of ‘phantasia’, a concept elaborated by the Stoics (in the middle period in particular)
and subsequently by Longinus, and saw a parallel relation between representation
and the sublime.28 The sublime for Marin is a potential feature of representation,
rather than its opponent, in contrast therefore to Jean-François Lyotard’s emphasis
on the ‘unpresentable’ (imprésentable) sublime, since for Lyotard, Kant’s categories
cannot achieve any recovery of the absolute; both representation and any notion of
presentation within it ascribe too much stability to their subject matter.29
Exchanges between Marin and Lyotard can be found in their work throughout
the 1970s and into the 1980s, including reviews, dedications and references. In Just
Gaming, from 1979, Lyotard reaffirms his view, first stated in a review of Marin’s study
of 1975 of the Port-Royal Logic and Pascal’s Pensées, that it is when Marin departs from
semiotics and injects some irony into his critique of representation that his work is
modern.30 Marin, meanwhile, saw his investigation of the representation of power
and the subject as more critical than Lyotard recognized: for example, he dedicates an
analysis of a fable by Jean de La Fontaine to Lyotard, an act that imitates La Fontaine’s
own ironic dedication of the fable, ‘Le Pouvoir des Fables’, to an ambassador.31 In
the case of Poussin, the apparent suspension of the opposition between art and
nature affected by both phantasia and the sublime is in Marin’s view a reason for
investigating the limits to Poussin’s art while at the same time seeing these limits as
unexpectedly powerful.
Marin and Lyotard were both contributors to the collective volume Du Sublime
(1988). In his essay, ‘The Sublime Offering’, Jean-Luc Nancy noted that ‘le sublime
est à la mode’ [‘the sublime is in fashion’] – he mentions Marin, Derrida, Lyotard,
Deleuze and Deguy, as well as Mike Kelley – and he proposed to outline shared interests

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3 Nicolas Poussin, Landscape in thinking about a topic that is, as he argues in the volume’s preface, a common
during a Thunderstorm with
Pyramus and Thisbe, 1651. inheritance, a tradition of questioning aesthetics.32 He discusses the link between the
Oil on canvas, 192.5 × 273.5 sublime and the limits of art, interested in how the category of art is suspended and
cm. Frankfurt am Main:
Städel Museum. Photo: U. surpassed by the sublime. This reminds us of Derrida and ‘la relève’, which Nancy has
Edelmann/Städel Museum/
ARTOTHEK. in mind too, adding that while philosophical enquiry emphasizes the culmination of
art in truth, thinking about the sublime offers the flipside to this trajectory, involving
instead potential and ongoing thought. Nancy refers to the way the imagination works
when confronted by the sublime: ‘In the sublime, the imagination no longer has to do
with its products but with its operation — and thus with its limit.’33
For some modern commentators on Longinus and the sublime, including
the contributors to Du Sublime, the reader or spectator is uniquely challenged by
this experience.34 Some of the contradictions and complexities of the sublime as
identified by Immanuel Kant can certainly be read back to, but not necessarily onto,
the rhetorical effects discussed by Longinus in relation to poetry and oratory. In
his articles from the 1980s and in his 1984–85 seminar on Poussin at the École des
Hautes Études en Sciences sociales in Paris, Marin was exploring the concept of the
sublime, focusing on Poussin’s paintings and his correspondence. He also examined
Poussin’s references to Torquato Tasso, to the modes and to variation, with a view to
understanding how certain paintings challenged the categorization of the passions.35
When quoting Longinus (and trying out different translations), Marin usually
indicated where he wanted to read Longinus’s rhetorical terms across to the domain
of painting. This was how he detected the notion of the sublime at work in Félibien’s
dialogues and Poussin’s correspondence, even if the word itself was not used.36

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In ‘Awakening Metamorphoses: Poussin, 1625–35’ (152–70), Marin cites Tasso’s

account of the meeting between Rinaldo and Armida in Jerusalem Delivered when
discussing the disturbance of reason and identity that he sees represented by Poussin’s
sleeping figures (169–70 / 163–5). This brief recourse to Tasso reminds the reader that
Blunt proposed him as one of the sources for Poussin’s subjects and ideas, although
Marin’s emphasis is on the dynamics of identity and desire in the paintings.37 Marin’s
study of the links between Poussin’s landscapes, Longinus and Tasso has been
acknowledged and taken up by Clelia Nau, who argues that it was Tasso who provided
Poussin with a highly original combination of Aristotle and Longinus.38
After an introduction tracing ‘a genealogy of the sublime from Kant to Longinus’
(225), Marin’s projected book was to discuss Poussin’s landscapes featuring tempests.
‘Description of a Painting and the Sublime in Painting’ (66–103) concerns Landscape
during a Thunderstorm with Pyramus and Thisbe (plate 3). The lightning, dark clouds, wind and
noise of a tempest disrupt nature’s order. As Marin puts it, another sort of visibility
is involved (72 / 76). He is fascinated by the possibility of investigating how the
painting depicts extremes both of human passions in its narrative and of the natural
world in the cosmic order’s disruption (96–7 / 99). His interest comes especially
from the idea of a putatively ‘unrepresentable’ subject of painting (71 / 75), which
challenges Poussin’s art (‘really pushing easel painting to the limit’, according to T. J.
Clark)39 , while also demonstrating the range of painting’s power.
This article of 1981 is a turning point in Marin’s work on Poussin. His
quoted textual references are Poussin, Victor Goldschmidt, Claude Imbert, Ovid,
Longinus, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. The main reference is Goldschmidt’s Le
Système stoïcien et l’Idée de temps (1953), used to discuss the Stoics’ concept of time and
their parallel between the wise spectator and the actor who plays his part without
being overwhelmed by it.40 It is surely significant that Goldschmidt’s study is not
mentioned by Blunt. Marin orientates his discussion of Pyramus and Thisbe around
narrative, time, Stoicism and the sublime, constructing a Stoic model of narrative
time and of spectatorship, therefore partly modifying and partly departing from
Blunt’s memorable account of Poussin and Stoicism, which is primarily concerned
with a rich tradition of cosmology and mythology, traced from the early Stoics
through Macrobius to Tommaso Campanella.41 Where Blunt establishes the
intellectual context for an interpretation of the meaning of the landscapes, seeking
to inspire reflection, through Poussin, upon the word and wisdom of God, it is
noticeable that Marin instead uses one part of this context to enable him to explore
the narrative and formal questions posed by the relationship between the different
areas of the paintings. Although Goldschmidt’s account has been criticized for its
‘speculative and synthetic’ approach to Stoic time,42 it is clear that Marin found his
interpretation a very useful model and that Goldschmidt enabled him to shift his
enquiry from Stoic mysticism to the physics and logic of Stoic philosophy.
Regarding Pyramus and Thisbe, Marin discusses the simultaneous appearance of
Thisbe discovering Pyramus in the foreground and the lion from the same story in
the middle distance. In the story in Ovid the lion had left blood on Thisbe’s shawl,
causing Pyramus to believe that Thisbe had been killed and to stab himself, whereas
in the painting the action leading to this belief occurs ‘at the same time’ as Thisbe’s
later discovery of Pyramus’s body. Marin recognizes that this change of cause and
effect may be seen as part of the general allegory of the chaos of human passions
(94). But it is important to note that he links this adjustment of cause and effect to
the Stoic idea of the extended present of movement. Goldschmidt explains that God
understands how these parts of the present are related together, whereas humans

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see the simultaneity as an array of fragments. Thus it is possible to see why Marin
suggests that Poussin attempts to embrace this view of time by presenting parts of the
story in one scene.
In Goldschmidt’s account of the Stoics, wise indifference is considered the best
response from the spectator observing the events of the world. Summing up all
the aspects of the stories represented, Marin comes to Thisbe as she recognizes the
body of Pyramus. He cites Ovid, ‘[she] shiver[ed], as the sea / Shivers beneath a little
sliding breeze’,43 and thinks of the lake, but notices that it is strangely untouched by
the storm. Is this a sign of the artist’s inability to represent the tempest in full? In his
conclusion, Marin suggests that the lake is like the eye of the wise spectator, presented
as being detached from the scene that the painting represents.
In ‘The Classical Sublime: “Tempests” in some Landscapes by Poussin’ (1984),
Marin is concerned less with the spectator and more with the notion of the absence
or disappearance of part of the representation. He revisits the cracks in the system of
representation that indicate the effects of the sublime, focusing on the full range of
effects within the painting and taking up Longinus’s comparison between pathos and
ethos: ‘Emotional effects (pathos) play as large a part in the production of the sublime as
the study of character (ethos) does in the production of pleasure.’44 In Marin’s paper on
4 Nicolas Poussin, Landscape the je-ne-sais-quoi the sublime is defined as an effect-affect so radically different as to be
with a Calm, 1650–51. Oil
on canvas, 97 × 131 cm. Los ‘not a passion, but the pathos of all the passions’ (212).45 But instead of understanding the
Angeles: The J. Paul Getty sublime as representation’s blind spot, it should be considered as part of representation’s
Museum. Photo: The J. Paul
Getty Museum. apparatus, the part revealed when representation is under pressure.

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5 Nicolas Poussin, Landscape Having focused on Landscape during a Thunderstorm with Pyramus and Thisbe in 1981,
with a Storm, 1651. Oil on
canvas, 99 × 132 cm. Rouen: Marin turns in 1984 to the pair of landscapes painted for another of Poussin’s friends
Musée des Beaux-Arts. Photo: and patrons Jean Pointel in 1650–51: Landscape with a Calm (Los Angeles: The J. Paul
C. Lancien and C. Loisel.
Getty Museum; plate 4) and Landscape with a Storm (Rouen: Musée des Beaux-Arts; plate
5). If the figure of the storm underlines but also stretches the limits of painting, then
Marin suggests that the difference between this pair of landscapes may allow him to
pursue his thinking about the sublime. Calm epitomizes the serenity of the scene, and
Marin quotes Félibien on the parallel between painting and Nature achieved in such a
subject, since Nature herself paints in this way on the surface of water. Indeed, while
Art seeks to imitate the beauties of Nature, in this spot Art and Nature are equal. The
lake lies at the centre of a carefully ordered landscape, uniting architecture, everyday
life and the natural world. The harmonious balance of light and shade underlines the
complete sense of the painting fulfilling Poussin’s aim to offer a scene of delectation.
In the same text by Félibien, an imaginary dialogue between the author and
a certain Pymandre, a storm takes the two men by surprise. This text is used as a
source of contemporary seventeenth-century theoretical reflections and as a resource
for finding a way to plot the difference between the two paintings. If they are to be
considered seriously as a pair, then where, Marin asks, is it possible to locate the
element that indicates the imminent transformation? Initially two threats to the
unblemished continuous tranquillity of the scene in Calm are noticed: the horse and
rider on the left who are suddenly leaving the scene, and the cloud stretching across

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Nigel Saint

the sky towards the mountain in the background: ‘For anyone with the intuition to
detect its early warning sign, the storm is announced and initiated in calm weather’
(134).46 Marin also points out the compositional change between the harmonious
space of Calm and the disruption seen in Storm, which has two opposing lines of
energy, one horizontal in the foreground and the other oblique from front right to
back left. The harmonious present of Calm gives way to the sudden light of Storm,
with human figures and buildings seemingly too close or too far: the effects of the
sublime, in Marin’s view, cannot be made commensurate with the experience of
looking. Since this is not possible, then it is also impossible to circumscribe the
sublime, to contain it in a theory, unlike the relationship between Nature and the
theory of Painting discussed in relation to Calm.
As well as noting the horse and rider and the menacing clouds, Marin took up a
remark, made at the end of the conference paper on which the article of 1984 ‘The
Classical Sublime’ is based, about the absence of any reflection of the clouds in the
lake (257 n. 53 / 149 n. 1). This strange failing occurs in such a significant part of
the painting, namely the depiction of the mirror of Nature. In Marin’s view, this is
both a moment of theoretical syncope, since both the serene lake and the missing
reflection are registered, and a negative mark of the unrepresentable power of the
sublime.47 This is a seductive fusion of ideas from Marin, not least because of the
frisson afforded by the negative, a quality of his analysis that T. J. Clark comments
on: ‘The interesting thing is that Marin wants the disturbance too; maybe in Calm he
wants it too much.’ It could equally be argued that Marin is trying to include both
the horse and rider and the absent clouds in his interpretation. On the other hand,
Clark goes on to say crucially that for Marin ‘the structure aims at the disturbance, it
produces it, it always has it in mind’.48 In the painting the cloud thins out beyond
the main building, which is the part of the sky reflected in the lake, even if there
should be some trace. Todd Olson has argued that the reflection of the cloud is
minimized in order to ‘enhance the blue’ and ‘make the surface more uniform.’49
Marin’s pursuit of his idea leads to the realization that the clouds will continue to
move into the scene and that their reflected appearance is therefore menacingly
imminent; if their reflection is currently minimized this only increases the impact
their arrival will have.50
It is hard to quantify the degree of transformation between the two scenes. Marin
argues that the difference between the two paintings is best seen as a certain degree
of variation, since he is interested in how elements of Storm may be detectable in Calm.
He notes a subtle but important distinction between variation and transformation,
referring for the latter to Damisch’s work on perspective (256 n. 42 / 141 n. 1).
Variation concerns an alteration that remains within the system of representation,
while it seems that for Marin transformation is too radical a term and would apply
to a different order of representation entirely. In the essay ‘Déposition du temps
dans la représentation peinte’, Marin argues that although in representing a storm
Poussin tried to make the effects present again, the figures used to do this can only
ever be representative and therefore carry some mark of the sublime’s withdrawal
from them, involving ‘a difference or a variation that is the very condition of its [the
storm’s] presentation’.51 Marin emphasizes this difference by using quotation marks
around ‘Tempests’ in the title of his article of 1984.
It can be argued, then, that during his work in the 1980s Marin increasingly saw
the idea of variation as a key feature of Poussin’s paintings, starting with the parallels
with ancient Greek music and Virgil’s Aeneid in the celebrated letter to Chantelou on
the modes of 24 November 1647, reproduced as an appendix to Sublime Poussin (230–3).

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Identifying the different genres in the three levels of Pyramus and Thisbe, respectively
historical, bucolic and landscape, leads the spectator to link them through an
emblematic figure in each one, finally leading to the delectation afforded by
understanding the whole.52 Marin thus articulates the second, recuperative stage in
the Kantian encounter with the sublime.53 After the initial exposure to the effects of
the sublime comes the recognition of the artist’s skill in representing them. Narrative
has a crucial role here and is integral to the experience of the sublime, as Derrida
argued in The Truth in Painting: ‘But does not the distance required for the experience
of the sublime open up perception to the space of narrative? Does not the divergence
between apprehension and comprehension already appeal to a narrative voice?’54
Marin’s incorporation of the letter on the modes into his exploration of the
paintings is unapologetic. Despite the influential critique set out in Paul Alfassa’s
analysis of the sources and presentation of Poussin’s ideas,55 in Marin’s view
Poussin’s definitions help to differentiate effects rather than to classify style (187).
He focuses on the ‘son des paroles’ section of the letter, since an interest in sound
as well as meaning makes the link between poetry and painting more fertile.56 To

6 Nicolas Poussin, Self-

Portrait, 1649. Oil on canvas,
78.3 × 64.5 cm. Berlin: Die
Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin,
Gemäldegalerie. Photo: Jörg
P. Anders.

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Nigel Saint

7 Nicolas Poussin, Self-

Portrait, 1649–50. Oil on
canvas, 98 × 74 cm. Paris:
Musée du Louvre. Photo:
Réunion des Musées
Nationaux.

these ideas about effects and sound, Marin adds the conviction, shared by Edward
Said in Musical Elaborations (1992), that variation allows him to plot the particular
features of individual paintings in pairs or series. According to Said, variation
allows different approaches to a theme, enhancing an audience’s experience of
recognition and understanding through attentive – though not necessarily flawless
– listening or in this case looking. The interdependence of the works subjected
to variation heightens their potential for Said.57 It also frees them from the social
constraints and contexts that he sees impinging on any artwork. This offers a way of
supplementing Tony Green’s observation that Poussin’s comments on the modes are
concerned with setting limits, since the idea of variation is seen to offer freedom
within those limits.58
Marin’s interest in variation is explored in ‘Variations on an absent portrait’
(183–208), on the two self-portraits in Berlin (Gemäldegalerie; plate 6) and Paris
(Musée du Louvre; plate 7). Here Marin is again attracted by the idea of a system

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of differences, allowing for variations on the given topic. The 1649 self-portrait,
painted for Pointel, is referred to by Marin as A, the slightly later self-portrait
of 1649–50 for Chantelou as B. While A is immobilized by the background, B is
motionless against a shifting background. Marin sees in A the construction of a
portrait of a self based on the view of an individual in front of a mirror, leading
from the loss of the individual facing immobilization and death in a mirror to a
constructed view of the self. In B he is interested in signs of the unrepresentable
‘true’ portrait of the self. He suggests that the word ‘effigies’, meaning portrait,
shadow and spectre, may refer as well to the shadow cast in the painting by the
artist. That shadow would mark a potential self-portrait and evoke the myth of
the origin of painting. Marin is also interested in the possible link between the
Pythagorean ‘Y’ at the beginning of line two of the inscription and the two hands of
the figure who is mostly invisible out of frame to the left.
Marin argues that the self-portraits are important moments in Poussin’s art and
concern its independence: ‘he risks his painting’ (185) [‘il y risque sa peinture’ (187)].
They are articulations of his freedom within limits. Marin refers to the context of
Chantelou’s jealousy regarding his rival collector Pointel and the difficulty of finding
a portraitist adequate to the task. It is not surprising therefore that the self-portraits
have been interpreted as a sophisticated exercise in the ethics of artist–patron
relations, with Poussin seen as the author here of ‘essays’ directed at his patrons.59
Marin’s general guide in reading all the paintings from the period 1647–51 was
Poussin’s statement in a letter of March 1647: ‘I know how to vary when I wish’ (186)
[‘Je sais varier quand je veux’ (189)]. In Détruire la peinture, the letter on the modes was
used to discuss the spatial arrangement of pictorial representation,60 while in his later
work Marin emphasizes variations in figures and time: the musical parallels provide a
way into the story of these two self-portraits linked by modal differences.
The figure of Painting is being admired by the figure of the painter at the centre
of B, who is looking across the space of his studio, while Painting is being held by her
lover, in Marin’s view the painter again, although this time he cannot be represented:

It is this true self-portrait of the painter that the figure of the painter is looking
at outside the painting, a self-portrait, invisible because true, that only the painter
in his representation of painting can see, but beyond all representation,
and which he leaves to the viewer to guess at, through his hands which are
drawing Painting to himself, hands that draw and paint, on the canvas, the
appearances, the shadows, of things and beings. (207)61

Firstly the self’s double can only be seen outside the frame of representation and
secondly it is only the represented self that can see this double. The diademed figure
of the theory of painting is the visible part of the duo, while the two hands are those
of the practising artist. Therefore, as Marin argues in one of his last commentaries
on the Louvre Self-Portrait (B), the allegory of theory joined with practice will never
be seen, since in keeping with his work on the sublime, an element will withdraw
itself from the representation.62 One of the two terms is missing, with the frame
cutting it off. On the other hand, the frame draws the spectator back to what is
presented within the frames here. While the artist is placed in front of some frames,
nonetheless the painting is still framed; his ideal indeed is painted between two
left-hand frames.63 Marin is working at a greater understanding of the ways in which
representation is a relation between the canvas, the subject being presented and the
frame(s): everything that contributes to this makes up the story, time and place of the

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representation.
In ‘Fragments of a Walk through Poussin’s Ruins’ (143–51), Marin comments
on Panofsky’s analysis of ruins in Poussin in the first version of his ‘Et in Arcadia
ego’ essay.64 In part two of the essay of 1936 Panofsky moved from a discussion
of ‘a metaphysical principle’ connecting ‘Life’ and ‘Death’ in Poussin to a lengthy
exploration of metamorphosis in Dance to the Music of Time (London: Wallace
Collection), Apollo and Phaeton (Berlin: Gemäldegalerie) and The Empire of Flora (Dresden:
Gemäldegalerie), before concluding the section with an interpretation of Poussin’s
ruins.65 Taking up Panofsky’s remarkable orchestration of ideas, Marin proposes
to consider the ruins as articulations of architectural theory and to examine the
architecture and organization of certain paintings. For Marin the ruins indicate past
and future time and the hidden power of representation.
He discusses the Triumph of David (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery), the Plague
at Ashdod (Paris: Musée du Louvre), the Adorations in Dresden (Gemäldegalerie) and
London (National Gallery), the Landscape with St Matthew (Berlin: Gemäldegalerie) and
Landscape with St John on Patmos (Chicago: Art Institute), and the Death of Sapphira (Paris:
Musée du Louvre). Where Panofsky had discussed the architectural ideals in the ruins
of some of these paintings, Marin adds ‘the negative marks of a temporal asceticism’
and the narrative function of these objects (144). He emphasizes how the ruins point
to the origin or end of the story, looking beyond Panofsky’s association of details
with ‘the revelation of a metaphysical principle’.66 Although Walter Benjamin is not
a frequent reference in Marin’s work, the emphasis on the secret power of the ruins
and the reluctance to follow Panofsky with his metaphysical principle suggests some
8 Nicolas Poussin, The Benjaminian influence. Benjamin’s critique of history and art history sought to break
Death of Sapphira, 1652. Oil
on canvas, 122 × 199 cm. with historical continuity and pursued a disruptive model of time.67 In the Berlin and
Paris: Musée du Louvre.
Photo: Réunion des Musées
Chicago Landscapes, Marin sees the building block having the potential to become stone
Nationaux. again; he also employs the Stoic term ‘palingenesis’ in the sense of rebirth. For Marin,

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the force of the architectural fragment connects the being of the landscape with its
representation in painting (150).
Meanwhile, the reading of the Death of Sapphira demonstrates how the paradox
of the time of ruins is incorporated into the story (plate 8). In Marin’s view the city
backdrop seems untouched by time, which he deems significant in view of the story
being represented. Marin points out the man helping a seated woman in the middle
distance. Beside them are some blocks of stone, left over from the construction of the
town and situated temporally between the construction site and the future ruins, at
a point in the story when both an act of charity and a condemnation are depicted.68
Marin notes that on the plane of representation Peter’s index finger points to this
seated figure, reiterating the paradox of the ruins, since they point to the miracle of
the cure, or the opposite of decay, alongside the debris (150–1). One can add that the
man in the middle distance seems in fact to be pointing towards Peter, rather than
simply opening his arms, as if explaining to the woman the event that is occurring
and the source of her cure.
Marin implicitly links this paradoxical referencing of the past and future to the
representation of myths of origins and endings in Poussin. This is the key to his
interest, developed in ‘Sur une tour de Babel dans un tableau de Poussin’ of 1988,
in the ruined or unfinished building in the background of the Pyramus and Thisbe,
connecting it with the extreme subject matter of the painting.69 Marin ceased work
on the painting just before the restoration work, exhibition and publications of 1987–
88, including Oskar Bätschmann’s study.70 Bätschmann later included a chapter on
the painting in his Nicolas Poussin: Dialectics of Painting, which argued that the Neoplatonic
theory of the mirror of Bacchus, coupled with the signs of the Jupiter-Bacchus story
in the two flashes of lightning, explain the calm lake.71 One problem with this view
is the use of the Birth of Bacchus of 1657 to compare that painting’s small stretch of water
with the lake in the Pyramus and Thisbe landscape, since they seem to have very different
roles and the size of the paintings differs so greatly. A more general concern crops up
when Bätschmann returns to his interpretation of the painting in a methodological
essay of 2003.72 Bätschmann’s recognition of ‘conjecture’ and ‘qualified’ subjectivity
in argumentation is counteracted by his emphasis on correct interpretation and his
candid assertion that his argument is the right one: ‘it is impossible to imagine how
someone else could come up with another text.’73 ‘Text’ here can be taken to mean
both his analysis and the sources on which it is based. Marin was unsure about such
a dependence on the ‘right’ sources, as can be seen in his account of a discussion
with Edgar Wind about methodology, when Wind proposed that a certain medal by
Alberti was only hard to interpret because the right textual source had not yet been
found. In Marin’s view such an approach risked simplifying the relationship between
text and image that was set up within the medal itself.74
Marin links the mysterious building with the story of the Tower of Babel, reading
the Babel story as the moment of shift from the transcendental other to the realm of
absolutism. His reading is mediated by discussions of the commentaries by Dante and
Hegel on the Biblical story. In Hegel’s view, the attempt by the community at Babel
to establish itself in spite of Yahweh self-destructs sublimely, since at the moment
the edifice attempted to reach the inaccessible and inexpressible that is beyond all
phenomena, the community was dispersed.75 The community attempts to substitute
its name for the name of God; Marin notes that language and architecture are
inseparable here.76 Turning to Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia (‘On Vernacular Eloquence’),
Marin discusses Dante’s view that only Hebrew retains the grace of the original pre-
Babel and Adamic language.77 The ruined tower in the background therefore points

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Nigel Saint

back to the lost unity of the community and forward to its realization by the Jews.
Like Babel, Marin argues, the figure of the storm presents in painting an equivalent
combination of confusion and dispersion, ruin and project.78
The use of Hegel’s Aesthetics in ‘Sur une tour de Babel’ raises the question of the
extent to which Marin departed from a Kantian view of the sublime. Marin’s debt to
Kant has already been mentioned concerning the violence and unrepresentability of a
tempest, the relationship between reproductive and productive imagination, and the
idea of the withdrawal of a figure from a representation. Marin’s previous exploration
of Stoic and Kantian ideas in relation to Poussin’s landscapes led him in this essay to
build on Hegel’s critique of Kant, in particular Hegel’s call for more attention to the
link between art and the absolute. The question of time, however, would suggest a
coexistence between the representation of suddenness and explosion in a tempest, on
the one hand, and the references to past and future time, community and narrative
in the paintings with ruins, on the other. Marin’s reading of Pyramus and Thisbe here
also indicates a particular interest in the origin of language and the voice, linked by
Marin to Poussin’s interest in the modes and the ‘son des paroles’. With his emphasis
on the power and gaps within representation, on the principle of variation and on
the complexity of pictorial time, Marin is seeking to harness ideas adapted from Kant,
Hegel, Dante and Benjamin to draw out the complexities of Poussin’s art.
In his study of the je-ne-sais-quoi in early modern literature, thought and culture,
Richard Scholar is generally receptive to Marin’s work on Pascal, dialogue and
infinity, on Gabriel Naudé and the coup d’état, and on the je-ne-sais-quoi, the sublime and
aesthetics.79 At the same time Scholar refers to critics who see the je-ne-sais-quoi as the
harbinger of later work in aesthetics on the sublime: in his view Marin is adopting a
genealogical approach coupled with a ‘teleological tendency’, presenting Kant as the
‘conquering hero’. By referring to Kantian concepts six times in his essay ‘Panofsky
and Poussin in Arcadia’, Marin is certainly suggesting that Kant is Panofsky’s hero
when studying Poussin, but in his case Kant is not the only hero, while Poussin is the
Master (101 / 103).
For Marin, a genealogical approach to ideas is understood in Foucault’s anti-
teleological and non-linear sense.80 Readers of Marin’s later work on Poussin will
find attention both to the dynamics of looking and the strategies of representation
in the paintings and to philosophical discourses from before, during and after
the seventeenth century. His project involves a re-reading of the foundational
seventeenth- and twentieth-century texts of Poussin studies, from Poussin’s letters
and Félibien, to Blunt and Panofsky. Reflecting on the legacy of Marin’s project can
expose a wealth of potential critical approaches to representation. After his earlier
semiotic work on the foundations of seventeenth-century representation, and on
reading and looking at paintings, his work on the sublime led him to develop his
understanding of the powers and limits of representation, resulting ultimately in
the address of a cautionary note at contemporary theorists eager to rid themselves of
mimesis.81 Marin found that representation in the hands of Poussin possessed a force
and a resilience that he needed to reaffirm for new generations of critics.

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Notes 1984, 66–77.

I am grateful to the British Academy both for funding a 15 Louis Marin, Études sémiologiques: Écritures, peintures, Paris, 1971, 19–23;
Postdoctoral Fellowship, during which the groundwork for this Louis Marin, ‘La lecture du tableau d’après Poussin’, Cahiers de
article was done, and for a subsequent Small Research Grant l’Association internationale des études françaises, 24, 1972, 251–66 ; Marin, To
to work in Paris. I would like to thank Russell Goulbourne for Destroy Painting, 74–8 / 92–6. Études sémiologiques explores sign systems
his detailed comments on the final draft and also Geneviève in Poussin, Klee, Champaigne, Pascal, New Testament narratives and
Bouffartigue, Alain Cantillon, Emma Gilby, Agnès Guiderdoni, Perrault; in the case of painting, Marin was interested in landscapes,
Maria Loh, Françoise Marin, Todd Olson, David Packwood, portraits and still lifes. For further discussion of the links between
Philippa Plock and Richard Scholar for their help at various Marin’s earlier and later work on Poussin, see Nigel Saint, ‘Pour l’amour
stages. This article is dedicated to the memory of Malcolm Bowie. d’un plaisir sévère: Following Louis Marin’, in Martin Heusser, Michèle
Hannoosh, Leo Hoek, Charlotte Schoell-Glass and David Scott, eds,
Text and Visuality: Word & Image Interactions 3, Amsterdam and Atlanta,
1 Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin, Paris, 1995 [Sublime Poussin, translated
1999, 65–75. The Arcadian Shepherds features, for example, in a late article
by Catherine Porter, Stanford, CA, 1999]. References will be to the
on the representation of voice: see Louis Marin, ‘Aux marges de la
translation first and the original French second, except for section
peinture: voir la voix,’ De La Représentation, 329–41.
page-runs where only the English reference is given. See 225–7
16 Appendix 2 of Sublime Poussin gives the letter in full (228–9).
for the plan of 1988. For the essay in the collective volume on the
17 See Anthony Blunt, The Paintings of Nicolas Poussin, London, 1967, vol. 1
sublime, see Louis Marin, ‘Sur une tour de Babel dans un tableau de
(text), 223.
Poussin’, in Jean-François Courtine and others, Du Sublime, Paris, 1988,
18 Marin, To Destroy, 74 / 91 and 81 / 99; Marin, Études sémiologiques, 154 n.
237–58 [Louis Marin, ‘On a tower of Babel in a painting by Poussin’,
83.
in Jean-François Courtine and others, Of the Sublime: Presence in Question,
19 ‘Toutefois, à notre sens, seul le questionnement qu’introduit le
translated with an afterword by Jeffrey S. Librett, Albany, NY, 1993,
sublime permettrait d’interpréter cette relève, en particulier avec les
177–91].
figures de l’ “informe”, du “géant”, du “serpent” ou de la “tempête”.
2 Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the
Il s’agirait donc de réarticuler par une nouvelle problématique à la
Love of Painting, Princeton, NJ, 1996, 196. For other engagements with
fois historique, iconographique, philosophique, mais aussi formelle
Marin’s work, see the following: Oskar Bätschmann, Nicolas Poussin:
et plastique, l’immense travail fait par A. Blunt.’ (131, n. 4) This
Dialectics of Painting, London, 1999; Todd P. Olson, Poussin and France:
acknowledgement of Blunt’s ‘indispensable’ (from earlier in the
Painting, Humanism, and the Politics of Style, New Haven and London, 2002;
note) and ‘impressive’ (immense) work may also reflect the sympathy
Clelia Nau, Le Temps du sublime: Longin et le paysage poussinien, Rennes, 2005;
Marin felt for Blunt after his demasking as a Soviet spy. My thanks to
T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing, New Haven and
Françoise Marin for her comments on her husband’s views.
London, 2006; and Jonathan Unglaub, Poussin and the Poetics of Painting:
20 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance’, Margins of Philosophy, translated by
Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso, Cambridge, 2006.
Alan Bass, Chicago, IL, 1982, 19–20 n. 23 (translator’s note).
3 This duality is the spur to Keith Moxey’s study of Holbein’s portraits:
21 Marin, ‘Toward a theory of reading’, 315.
see Keith Moxey, ‘Mimesis and iconoclasm’, Art History, 32: 1, February
22 I have changed ‘shapeless’ to ‘formless’ to translate ‘informe’ above:
2009, 52.
see Georges Bataille, ‘Formless’, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, edited
4 For essays exploring all these aspects of representation, see this
and translated by Alan Stoekl, Manchester, 1985, 31.
collection: Louis Marin, De La Représentation, eds Daniel Arasse and
23 ‘La tempête dans le paysage’; ‘le colossal ou le choc de l’ostentation’;
others, Paris, 1994 [Louis Marin, On Representation, eds Daniel Arasse
‘la violence ou l’absolu de la force’ (223–4).
and others, translated by Catherine Porter, Stanford, CA, 2001].
24 For the first two essays in counterpoint, see the references at 225–6
5 See Louis Marin, Détruire la peinture, Paris, 1997 (1977), 35 [To Destroy
/ 223–4. For Babel, see n. 1 above. For Marin’s last discussion of the
Painting, translated by Mette Hjort, Chicago, IL, 1995, 24]. References
Medusa (the principal one being in To Destroy, 109–49 / 134–88),
will be to the translation first and to the French second.
see ‘Déposition du temps dans la représentation peinte’ (1990), De
6 Roger Chartier, ‘Pouvoirs et limites de la représentation: Marin, le
La Représentation, 287–91 [Louis Marin, ‘Depositing time in painted
discours et l’image’, Au Bord de la falaise: L’histoire entre certitudes et inquiétude,
representations’, On Representation, 290–4].
Paris, 1998, 173–90 [Roger Chartier, ‘The powers and limits of
25 Marin, ‘Panofsky and Poussin’, 107–8.
representation’, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language and Practices,
26 A full exposition of a possible post-Panofskian history and theory
translated by Lydia G. Cochrane, Baltimore, MD and London, 1997,
of art, albeit with major differences of emphasis, may be found in
90–103].
Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant L’Image: Questions posées aux fi ns d’une histoire
7 Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses, Paris, 1966, 19–31.
de l’art, Paris, 1990. Didi-Huberman, who studied with Marin, could
8 Louis Marin, ‘Discourse of power, power of discourse’, in Alan
be placed in a later grouping of historian-theorists, including Daniel
Montefiore, ed., Philosophy in France Today, Cambridge, 1983, 161–2.
Arasse, Yve-Alain Bois, Thierry de Duve and Jacqueline Lichtenstein,
My thanks to Françoise Marin for identifying the two unnamed
although the differences between their perspectives makes such a list
philosophers in the anecdote.
more arbitrary than in the case of Marin’s generation.
9 See Louis Marin, ‘Le concept de figurabilité, ou la rencontre entre
27 See Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, Dissertation sur la Joconde, Arrest Burlesque,
l’histoire de l’art et la psychanalyse’ (1986), De La Représentation, 67.
Traité du Sublime, ed. Charles-Henri Boudhors, Paris, 1942. On the
10 Marin’s reading was later summarized in the often reprinted essay,
translation of Longinus before Boileau, see Nau, Le Temps du sublime,
‘Toward a theory of reading in the visual arts: Poussin’s The Arcadian
19–47, and Emma Gilby, Sublime Worlds: Early Modern French Literature,
Shepherds’, in Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman, eds, The Reader in the
London, 2006, 2–4.
Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, Princeton, NJ, 1980, 293–324.
28 Marin, ‘The sublime in the 1670s: Something indefinable, a “je ne sais
11 ‘Aucune figure ne regarde à l’extérieur du tableau, ne me regarde,
quoi”?’, Sublime Poussin, 213 / 213. On phantasia, see Longin, Du Sublime,
ne serait-ce que pour me “positionner” au lieu du peintre comme
translated by Jackie Pigeaud, Paris, 1993, 136–41 (n. 40), and J. J.
œil voyant, comme sujet théorique, pour désigner et établir le
Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art, New Haven and London, 1974, 52–5.
lieu contemplatif, le circuit enchanté entre le tableau-regard et le
29 Jean-François Lyotard, Le Différend, Paris, 1983, 238–40. See also
spectateur-œil’ (Marin, To Destroy, 32 / 43).
Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, translated by
12 Marin, To Destroy, 79–90 / 97–109. See Erwin Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia
Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford, CA, 1994.
Ego: Poussin and the elegiac tradition’, Meaning in the Visual Arts,
30 Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, translated
Harmondsworth, 1970, 340–67, and Louis Marin, ‘Panofsky and
by Wlad Godzich, Minneapolis, MN, 1985, 15. See Jean-François
Poussin in Arcadia’, Sublime Poussin, 104–19.
Lyotard, ‘Que le signe est hostie, et l’inverse; et comment s’en
13 See also Cropper and Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, 196–205.
débarrasser’, Critique, 30: 342, Novembre 1975, 1111–26 ; reprinted as
14 On the foundations of Marin’s work on the theory of representation,
‘Humour en sémiothéologie,’ Rudiments païens: genre dissertatif, Paris, 1977,
see Milad Doueihi, ‘Traps of representation’, Diacritics, 14: 1, Spring
32–59.

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31 Louis Marin, Le Récit est un piège, Paris, 1978, 15–34. 55 Paul Alfassa, ‘L’origine de la lettre de Poussin sur les modes d’après un
32 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘L’Offrande sublime’, in Courtine and others, Du travail récent’, Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de L’Art français, 1933, 125–43.
Sublime, 37 and n. 1; Nancy, ‘Préface’, in Du Sublime, 7 [Jean-Luc Nancy, See Bätschmann, Nicolas Poussin, 39–40 and 125–8.
‘The sublime offering’, in Courtine and others, Of the Sublime, 25 and 56 See also Frederick Hammond, ‘Poussin et les modes: le point de vue
225 n. 1; Nancy, ‘Preface to the French Edition’, in Of the Sublime, 1]. d’un musicien’, in Bonfait, ed., Poussin et Rome, 88.
33 Nancy, ‘The sublime offering’, 40 [‘Dans le sublime, l’imagination 57 Edward W. Said, Musical Elaborations, London, 1992, 73–105.
ne touche plus à ses produits, mais à son opération – et ainsi à sa 58 Tony Green, Nicolas Poussin Paints the Seven Sacraments Twice, Watchet, 2000,
limite’ (Nancy, ‘L’Offrande sublime’, 57)]. Jeffrey Librett’s afterword 328.
to the English translation provides some useful reflexions on the 59 See David Carrier, ‘Poussin’s self-portraits’, Word & Image, 7: 2, 1991,
imagination and the reception of the sublime from the perspective 127–48; Sheila McTighe, Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape Allegories, Cambridge,
of the work of Nancy and others in the volume: Jeffrey S. Librett, 1996, 146–9; and Cropper and Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, 177–96.
‘Positing the sublime: Reading Heidegger reading Kant’, in Of the 60 Marin, To Destroy, 75–8 / 93–96.
Sublime, 193–219. 61 ‘C’est ce vrai autoportrait du peintre que la figure du peintre regarde
34 See Suzanne Guerlac, ‘Longinus and the subject of the sublime’, New hors tableau, un autoportrait, invisible parce que vrai, que seul le peintre
Literary History, 16: 2, 1985, 275–89. en sa représentation de peinture peut voir mais au-delà de toute
35 This information about the Marin seminar of 1984–5 is taken from représentation et qu’il laisse deviner au spectateur, par ses mains qui
the notes of Alain Cantillon, who was founding President in 2010 attirent à lui la Peinture, des mains qui dessinent et peignent, sur la
of the Paris-based Association Louis Marin (see http://dev-lm.msh- toile, les apparences, les ombres des choses et des êtres’ (207).
paris.fr/). 62 Louis Marin, ‘Le cadre de la représentation et quelques-unes de ses
36 Louis Marin, ‘The classical sublime: “Tempests” in some landscapes figures’, De La Représentation, 356 ; see also Marin, ‘Déposition du temps’,
by Poussin’, Sublime Poussin, 124 / 131–2, and ‘Sur une tour de Babel 284.
dans un tableau de Poussin’, 257 n. 40. For a less receptive critique 63 See Roland Barthes’s remark on the frame of representation: ‘That is
of Marin’s use of Longinus in the first of these articles, see Nicholas what representation is: when nothing emerges, when nothing leaps
Cronk, The Classical Sublime: French Neoclassicism and the Language of Literature, out of the frame: of the picture, the book, the screen’ (The Pleasure of the
Charlottesville, VA, 2002, 90–2 and 108–9. Text, translated by Richard Miller, London, 1976, 57).
37 See Blunt, Poussin, vol. 1, 148–9 and 361–6. Marin’s interpretation of 64 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia ego: On the conception of transience in
the two versions of Rinaldo and Armida is developed in two studies by Poussin and Watteau’, in Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton, eds,
Giovanni Careri: ‘Mutazioni d’affetti, Poussin interprete del Tasso’, in Philosophy & History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, Oxford, 1936, 223–54.
Olivier Bonfait, ed., Poussin et Rome: Actes du colloque de l’Académie de France à The later essay is ‘Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition’;
Rome, Paris, 1996, 353–66, and ‘Le Retour du geste antique: amour et Marin compares the two essays in ‘Panofsky and Poussin’ (see n. 12
honneur à la fin de la Renaissance’, in Giovanni Careri, ed., La Jérusalem above).
délivrée du Tasse: poésie, peinture, musique, ballet: actes du colloque, Paris, 1999, 65 Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia ego’, 240–7.
43–57. 66 Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia ego’, 240.
38 Together, in Nau’s view, they offered Tasso a way of amalgamating 67 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations,
a theory of human actions and their drama, on the one hand, with edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn, London,
an attention to the forces of nature and the passions, on the other: 1992, IX, 249. See Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le Temps: Histoire
see Nau, Le Temps du sublime, 137 and 156. The ‘glissements de terrain’ de l’art et anachronisme des images, Paris, 2000, 85–99. For a comparison
between the discourses of poetry and painting are crucial to Nau’s between Panofsky and Benjamin on ruins, see Carrier, ‘Poussin’s self-
argument. portraits’, 144–5.
39 Clark, The Sight of Death, 102. 68 Pierre Rosenberg, Nicolas Poussin 1594–1665, Paris, 1994, 471.
40 Victor Goldschmidt, Le Système stoïcien et l’Idée de temps, Paris, 1953. Cf. 69 Marin, ‘Sur une tour de Babel’, 243.
Martha Nussbaum, ‘Poetry and the passions: Two Stoic views’, in 70 Oskar Bätschmann, Nicolas Poussin, Landschaft mit Pyramus und Thisbe,
Jacques Brunschwig and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds, Passions & Perceptions: Frankfurt am Main, 1987.
Studies in Hellenistic Philosophy of the Mind, Cambridge, 1993, 97–149. 71 Bätschmann, Nicolas Poussin: Dialectics of Painting, 1999, 107.
41 Blunt, Poussin, vol. 1, 313–31, especially 326–7. 72 Oskar Bätschmann, ‘A guide to interpretation: Art historical
42 See John Sellars, ‘An ethics of the event: Deleuze’s Stoics’, Angelaki, 11: hermeneutics’, in Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg, eds,
3, 2006, 169 n. 35. Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History, Minneapolis, MN
43 Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by A. D. Melville, Oxford, 1986, 78. and London, 2003, 179–210.
44 Longinus, ‘On the Sublime’, XXIX, 2, in Classical Literary Criticism, edited 73 Bätschmann, ‘A guide to interpretation’, 203.
and translated by T. S. Dorsch, Harmondsworth, 1965, 138. 74 Louis Marin, ‘Le concept de figurabilité, ou la rencontre entre
45 ‘Pas une passion mais le pathos de toutes les passions’ (212). l’histoire de l’art et la psychanalyse’, De La Représentation, 64. See Louis
46 ‘L’orage s’annonce et s’amorce dans le temps calme pour qui en saura Marin, ‘Notes sur une médaille et une gravure’, Études sémiologiques,
pressentir le signe avant-coureur’ (143). 109–23.
47 Cf. Marin, ‘Déposition du temps’, 299–300. 75 Marin, ‘Sur une tour de Babel’, 252; see G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics:
48 Clark, The Sight of Death, 84. Lectures on Fine Art, translated by T. M. Knox, Oxford, 1975, vol. 2,
49 Olson, Poussin and France, 239–40. 638–9.
50 Cf. H.-W. van Helsdingen, ‘Notes on Poussin’s late mythological 76 Marin, ‘Sur une tour de Babel’, 253.
landscapes’, Simiolus, 29, 2002, 178. 77 See Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, ed. and translated by Stephen Botterill,
51 ‘Une différence ou une variation qui est la condition même de sa Cambridge, 1996, 13.
présentation’ (Marin, ‘Déposition du temps’, 292). 78 Marin, ‘Sur une tour de Babel’, 257.
52 Marin, ‘Sur une tour de Babel’, 246 n. 15. 79 Richard Scholar, The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe: Encounters with a
53 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, translated by James Creed Certain Something, Oxford, 2005, 11, 153–4 and 198.
Meredith, Oxford, 1952, 111–14. Guy Callan noted the link between 80 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, in Paul Rabinow,
Marin’s schemata of variation and Kant’s sublime in ‘Sublime Marin’, ed., The Foucault Reader, New York, 1984, 76–100.
The Art Book, 7: 4, 2000, 11. 81 See Louis Marin, ‘Mimésis et description’, De La Représentation, 266.
54 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoffrey
Bennington and Ian McLeod, Chicago, IL and London, 1987, 142
(‘Mais l’éloignement requis pour l’expérience du sublime n’ouvre-t-il
pas la perception à l’espace du récit? L’écart entre l’appréhension et la
compréhension n’appelle-t-il pas, déjà, une voix narrative?’, Jacques
Derrida, La Vérité en peinture, Paris, 1977, 163).

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