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For Poussin, the construction of a landscape involves the construction of a particular mental weather, so that each of the artist's technical considerations--color, line, form--is simultaneously a psychological consideration. Nature, in Poussin's work, is not inchoate. Nature has an affect that might be regarded almost as a kind of consciousness, although it is not always in harmony with the consciousness of the people who inhabit these landscapes. Landscape with Saint John on Patmos, painted around 1640, when Poussin was in his midforties, appears to be one of the first canvases in which the landscape takes on this role as a protagonist in the story. In order to show us John writing his gospel on the Greek island of Patmos, Poussin developed a composition that is a hymn to solidity: the solidity of the stony landscape; the still-eloquent rectangular and cylindrical fragments of classical architecture; the elegant buildings in the distance; the solidity of the saint himself, who suggests the timelessness of a figure on a sarcophagus, his long left arm, bare to the elbow, as muscular as a stone mason's. The painting is an architecture, composed of powerful rectilinear forms--both geological forms and the forms that men have carved from stone. And this architectonic space in turn suggests the architecture of Christianity, an implication that is underscored by the papers at John's side, the pages of the gospel that suggest an architect's plans. Yet to describe the painting in this way makes it sound more contrived than it really is, for the variations of color and touch, the extent to which Poussin honors the particular qualities of foliage and stone and cloth and clouds, giving each its indivisible individuality--all this complicates the design. In Poussin, there is no theme without variations.
