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La Tour probably never went to Rome; Nicolas Poussin, once he got there, rarely returned to France, although he was (in Rosenberg's words) "the greatest French painter of the 17th century—perhaps even the greatest French painter of all time." There are eleven Poussins in this show, and their cumulative effect has a Vergilian magnificence. The Death of Germanicus, 1626-28, in which the Roman general, allegedly poisoned by his adoptive father Tiberius, is seen exhorting his friends to avenge his death, is one of the supreme images of civic virtue in French art and Poussin's first full success in the heroic mode. One can dissect its mechanics—the contrasts between the masculine and feminine groups, the cross-quotations of pose and gesture that link the two, the brilliantly intelligent discretion with which Poussin used motifs from the antique—without losing touch with the deep emotions it conveys. Painterly language never strains against meaning: this is pure speech, not rhetoric. In the same way, Poussin's landscapes—as in the painting of St. John writing on Patmos—are grave and ample, the "Fair Champaign" of Milton's Paradise Regained:
Fertil of corn the glebe, oyl and wine,
With herds the pastures throng'd, with flocks the hills,
Huge Cities and high tow'r'd, that well might seem
The seats of mightiest Monarchs, and so large
The Prospect was, that here and there was room
For barren desert. . .
Nothing trivial can happen in this landscape; nature is didactic, chance has no place. Poussin's strenuous organization of its space, the carefully marked planes ranked across the canvas with no sudden plunges or corridors for the eye, was to become one of the fundamental ways of seeing landscape. It looks antique, but it was potentially modern. Its not-so-remote descendant would be the stony, planar monumentality of Cézanne's views of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Three hundred years later, it seems to point toward the flatness of classical modernism. This may be an illusion, but it is hard to shake; in any case, painting of Poussin's order of greatness often seems to predict the future at the very moment of assimilating the past. If there were nothing but these Poussins in this show, one would need to see it. But there is, of course, so much else besides them that "France in the Golden Age" becomes what it is meant to be: a feast. —By Robert Hughes