자연 속의 성서이야기: 니콜라 푸생의 기독교 풍경화

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the theme of Flight into Egypt represented in landscape paintings by Nicolas Poussin. The story of the Flight into Egypt is about the exile the Holy Family went through right after the Birth of the Christ Child as reported in the Bible. It is thus composed of a journey through nature with various episodes. Out of about 12 scenes mostly depicted in art Poussin painted only three repeatedly, i.e. the moment of a narrow escape, the rest on the journey, and the return from Egypt. In this paper 4 works from Poussin’s early years are first examined: The Rest on the Flight into Egypt in New York(1627∼1630), and in Winterthur(1630); The Return from Egypt in London(1629∼1630), and in Cleveland(1632∼1633). It is then followed by two Phocion series(1648), to eventually concentrate on The Rest on the Flight into Egypt(1657) in Hermitage, St. Petersburg. By looking into the relationship between the foreground figures and the background landscape in these art works, this paper attempts to find out how Poussin articulated landscape elements to support the main theme of a picture. It would fit into the theme of the symposium, Nature into a Picture Frame: Landscape Painting of the East and the West. In the early works, figures in the foreground are evenly arranged on the surface of the scene so as to form a kind of screen. They also take the most part of the lower half of the canvas. This results in that the landscape in the back ground is not logically connected to the figures in the foreground and remains simply as a backdrop. It does not have the function of creating space or atmosphere. It seems that Poussin was mainly interested in the representation of the Holy Family, i.e. a history painting. In the so-called ‘heroic landscapes’ of the 1640s, Poussin seems to succeed in uniting the story of human figures and the natural space in which they are acting. And The Rest on the Flight into Egypt in Hermitage is known as one of the last works executed in this experiment, achieving more advanced results. In this painting, allegory and landscape are fully combined together, so that the human drama and nature form a complicated relationship. The picture planes are fused into one, to deliver the concept of the Christianity accepted by the pagans. It could be said that the landscape elements not just pictorially support the contents of the painting, but produce one unified story together with Holy Figures in the foreground.