EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

The Kimbell Gets a Surprise

Nicolas Poussin’s Sacrament of the Ordination (1640's) is one of the masterpieces of Western art. I wrote about it last year when it failed to sell at auction. Now the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas has acquired it for $24 million. The Kimbell is a small museum specializing in those rarest of works, masterpieces. What few know, though, including the Kimbell is that they have also bought one of art’s great visual illusions. As I have demonstrated before, if you turn the painting (or a reproduction of it) 90^o to the left, the distinctive profile of Christ appears in the landscape facing to the left. Where Christ's "eye" would be, an N for Nicolas is formed by three tree trunks. The Sacrament with its 13 figures takes place inside Christ's mind which is, in turn, Poussin's. The illusion reveals the esoteric nature of Poussin’s theology, a belief that divinity occurs inside the human mind, not outside it. For a fuller account see: Poussin’s The Ordination.

Artists who followed Poussin have similar illusions in their work, none more obviously connected to Poussin’s example than Balthus’ The Mountain in New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Cézanne’s Bathers in Philadelphia, though, is another dramatic one.

Poussin himself would have been inspired by  Renaissance examples, none more important than the profile of Dante in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.