The Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1862

I

Paintings are another art whose objective is to portray the most beautiful and elevated terrestrial scenery and eventually just imitate nature through the magic of truth. It is a boundless art, so to speak, particularly in your time. Art must not be just about personality in your days. It must be, if I can say so, the comprehension of everything that it has been in history, and the requirements of the local color, far from precluding the originality and personality of the artist, amplify their horizons, develop and purify the taste entailing the creation of interesting works to art itself and to those who want to see a fallen civilization and forgotten ideas in that art.


The so-called historical painting of your schools is not up to the demands of the century. I dare say that there is more future to the artist in their individual researches about art and history than in that avenue where some say I began to tread. There is only one thing that can save art in your time. It is a new impulse and a new school through an alliance between two said contrary principles – realism and idealism – that leads the youngsters to understand that if the masters were called so it is because they lived with nature and their powerful imagination invented where it was necessary to invent but obeyed when needed to obey.


To a large number of arts ignorant people dispositions frequently replace knowledge and observation. Thus, one can find all over persons of interesting imagination, even artists, but not painters. These shall be accounted for as very ingenious draftsmen in history. The speedily work and prompt realization of imagination are gradually acquired through the study and practice in a continuous effort, despite the fact that one may have the skills to paint fast. Art in your century, and I do not say that in every way, fortunately materializes alongside impressive efforts of renowned names of modern painting. Why such a trend? That is what I will show in the forthcoming communication.

II

To understand paintings, as I said in my last communication, one needs to successively go from practice to concept and from concept to practice. I have spent almost my entire life in Rome; when contemplating the works of the masters, I tried to capture the intimate connection, the relationships and harmony of the highest idealism and the true realism. I have rarely seen a masterpiece that meets these two principles; I saw the ideal and the sense of brevity next to a brutal truth and I said to myself: this is the work of a human mind; this is where thought and work meet, soul and body: the whole life. I witnessed the ideas and the views of the soft masters in their understanding, in their forms, their colors, their effects; the expression of their minds was uncertain, their movements banal and without greatness. It takes a long initiation to understand the secrets, the whims and sublimity of nature. It is not just the will of the painter; there is also the huge task of observation and the struggle in one’s mind and in the ongoing realization of art; at some point it must bring to

the work at the hand the instincts and the sens d things, in a word it is always the two main principles: soul and body.

Nicolas Poussin