Nicolas Poussin

He was a man in love with geometry, as many artists have been.

Among them, some of the painters Huglot most admired, such as Poussin and Piero della Francesca.

But Huglot was also dedicated to working from life, so his subjects were asked to take up the guise of regular geometric solids.

Her recent work had involved the model adopting, as far as was possible for a softly rounded human body, the form of the pyramids at Giza.

It takes us back to Rollo and William of the Long Sword, to the Vikings and the Crusaders, to the conquerors of England and Sicily, to masterful prelates of the feudal age like Odo of Bayeux and Thomas Becket.

It brings us down to the admirals and men of art and letters of the Grand Siècle, Tourville and Duquesne, Poussin, Malherbe, and the great Corneille, to Charlotte Corday and the days of the Terror, and to the painters and scholars and men of letters of the 19th century, Géricault and Millet, Laplace and Léopold Delisle, Flaubert and Maupassant, and Albert Sorel.

It traces the laborious clearing of ancient forests, the rude processes of primitive agriculture, the making of Norman cider and the breeding of the Norman horse, the vicissitudes of trade in fish and marten skins, in pottery, cheap cottons, and strong waters, the development of a center of fashion like Trouville, or centers of war and commerce like Cherbourg and Havre.

It describes the slow building of monasteries and cathedrals and the patient labors of priests and monks, as well as the conquest of the Canaries, the colonization of Canada, and the exploration of the Great West.

Of those who were immediate peoples of Michelangelo, or carried out his designs, Daniel de Volterra was one of the most satisfactory.

His chief work, The Descent from the Cross, was considered by Poussin one of the three great pictures of the world.

It is sometimes said to have been designed by Michelangelo, but that is only a conjecture.

It has much action and life in it, but is somewhat affected in pose and gesture, and Volterra's work generally was deficient in real energy and conception and execution.

Yeah, absolutely.

Um, yeah, I mean, it's, it's a method that, uh, uh, you know, illustrators have used in the, in the 20th century, and also it goes back even further to, uh, people like Poussin and Tintoretto, and I'm sure many other artists who we, we don't know they did this, but they probably did, where they would, um, make little clay figurines of, of, of people and, you know, construct a sort of box, you know, with a, with a, with a, with a window on one side and light could come in, and you could arrange the figures like, like a little dollhouse and observe the light coming through.

And so, um, I knew that that was a way to do things.

I started playing around with that.

It's a, a painting called Et in Arcadia Ego.

It's a painting by Nicolas Poussin, a seventeenth century, uh, painting.

Um, so Et in Arcadia Ego, Latin for I, I too exist in paradise.

And you ca- it's hard to see in that image, but there are these three, you know, wandering hikers just hanging out in Arcadia, just cruising around paradise, and they come across this tomb, a sarcophagus.