The pantheism of light
Terence maioon It is a nice coincidence that two Frenchmen should have been neighbours in Rome in the mid-seventeenth century, Poussin and Claude. Two more diametrically opposed talents can scarcely ever have shared such Proximity. The former was the foremost exponent of Classicism in his time; the latter was the archetypal Romantic landscape Painter. Poussin is remembered as an intellectual and scholar of the antique. His pictures veil a geometrical underlay and are governed by strict canons of proportion. The reality he depicts is precisely differentiated ; it is a world in segments, the parts interrelating like the sections of some intricate nci ingenious machine. Claude is remembered as semi-illiterate, the son of a pastryChef, 'faux-naïf,' with not a little of the mystic about him. The world he envisions is a 11.111tarY affair, arrayed around the central irnage of the sun. Sunlight inundates Claude's landscapes, advancing from a pale, undifferentiated bortzon, through progressively more elaborately differentiated zones, and culminating ma foreground of distinct entities. The landscape is an 'organic' phenomenon, being 4,13Parently the outcome of a single developmental impulse. In effect Claude discovered a that novel kind of pictorial unity, one t-at was extended by Turner, Corot and t," Impressionists, and which is extant in the t of the present, in the abstractions of `‘othko, Pollock, Louis and Olitski, among Others. I do not believe any other Old Master ilas left so copious and far-reaching a legacy, b ut the accounting for Claude's influence has Yet to be done. Roger Fry provides the classic appraisal of Claude's peculiar disti„ t.'etion, an appraisal that can be extended io the heirs of Claude mentioned above: 'It Lnot a beauty of expressive parts but the f a whole.. .. It is in the cumulative 'ltect of the perfect co-ordination of parts 'One of which is by itself capable of absorbI,' g our attention or fascinating our imaginai;°11 that the power of a picture by Claude „,es. It is the unity and not the content that 'fleets us'—and it may affect us profoundly. akCiaude's commentators often note the , 'settee of signs of rural labour in these plc6tires , the dearth of ditches, hedges, ploughed ,e.ids and so on. It is implied therefore that ;laude is an illustrator of the Golden Age of lk s,agan myth, despite the fact that the const`ructed shelters, ships, soldiers, musical unurnents, Judges' (Christ, etc) populating rl'alaude's landscapes are proscribed from the radise of antique description. Instead we Li‘,ould see Claude as the definitive imager of fe°-Platonic world-view: the sun stands Or the the Godhead, the Demiurge from which all things flow, light being the essence of all things, of which the latter are simple condensations. Matter is equated with darkness, the entropy of light. The Claudian world is ideal, remote, impalpable, its images being 'ideas of the sun.' The unity of this putative world stems from the suppression of distinctions between things. It derives from the 'conquest of the darkness inherent in matter by the pouring-in of light, the unembodied' (Plotinus) and the suffusion of things thereby, whereby their materiality is transformed into a 'spiritual element.'
Mystical implications apart, this is a conception of nature closely paralleling that of modern physics. Do we ascribe the sway Claude's images have held over subsequent imaginations to those elements of intuitively grasped 'truth,' or to the potent nostalgia they exude ?This nostalgia is triggered not so much by the decor of romantically decaying ruins, by the placid assemblies of figures, or by the poignant remoteness of eternal spring, but by a perfect, unruffled, formal unity. The world-view we deduce from Claude corresponds to that which Piaget imputes to the 'pre-operational' phase of infancy. It would seem that the power of Claude's images is indebted to their realism and their fantasy, in equal measures.
The mode of pictorial unity Claude innovated is the fruit of incessant sketching out of doors and almost uncanny powers of visual recall. It often strains credulity that his paintings and the drawings of the Giber Veritatis (now at the British Museum until 26 June) were executed indoors, and are inventions rather than the direct transcription of natural fact. Claude has a perfect understanding of the way in which natural light
assimilates objects into a luminous, absorbent aggregate. He registers tonal shifts with unerring accuracy and knows precisely how to float a silhouette over a bright back ground and have it fuse with its surroundings. His genius is analogous to that of perfect pitch in a musician, save that it is a far rarer gift.
His mastery of tone is so complete that Claude may dare with impunity to paint in the windows and doors of a building repre sented as, say, a mile distant from the foreground. How astonishing then to discover he could bring off similar feats with the reduced means of wash and line in the Liber Veritatis. The Liber Veritatisis a record Claude kept of all his completed works to safeguard his reputation from the depredations of forgers and inferior imitators. The exhibition which is currently showing at the British Museum is the first occasion these two hundred drawings have been on public display.
There is every indication he intended them to stand on their own merits. Emphases are shifted, tones are changed, the distribu tion of masses may be slightly recast in accordance with the change of medium and altered size of the format. In their modest way these drawings often rival in luminosity and intimacy their splendid originals. The drawings also bring to the fore the artist's occasional clumsiness in figure-drawing, a weakness Ruskin found deplorable. There is an apocryphal story of Claude's confes sion to a friend that he sold his landscapes, but gave away the figures inside them for nothing. He had no need to deprecate this apparent deficiency. To a modern taste such overt naïveté is integral to the work's charm and power to move. An intermittent clumsi ness gives piquant relief to the serene vistas of the paintings, a redeeming grain of human imperfection.
have indicated something of the influence Claude has exercised over painters.
His vision may have had an even greater im pact on men of letters. Thomson's The Seasons repeatedly refers to him; descrip tions in Goethe's Italian Journey are ex plicitly 'after Claude'; passages in Shelley and Wordsworth less explicitly, but most vividly. The 'sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused,! Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,/And the round ocean, and the living air,/And the blue sky' is the most famous articulation of the Claudian mood in our literature—`Tintern Abbey.' Dostoievsky has a landscape by Claude intrude into the nightmare of Stavrogin's confession, where it is a talisman of beatific innocence haunting Stay rogin in his depravity. Closer to our own time, Wallace Stevens has provided the most extensive and acute analysis of Claude's mystique in 'Creedences of Summer,' whose imagery derives largely from Claude's 'Sermon on the Mount' painting (Frick Col lection). Bearing in mind the richness and complexity of these responses, the time is surely overdue for a reappraisal of Claude's achievement and of his meaning for successive generations.
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