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The picture is easily read. On a canvas which Clark remembered as far wider than it actually is something terrible has taken place. In a temperate landscape a male figure in the foreground has died in the coils of a python. To the right, and on another plane, a man with an outstretched arm registers horror; to the left of centre and on yet another plane a woman who has retrieved a bundle of laundry from a river registers even more horror. Subsequent visits will disclose further figures, some minuscule, on either bank of the stream, which contains a boat with fishermen. The ever-receding planes reveal classical buildings, with, in the far distance, mountains. The time will be registered as dawn or daybreak, with the sun illuminating the distant buildings, themselves, perhaps, memories of Giorgione.
Poussin scholarship is dominated by Anthony Blunt, whose monograph on the painter was published in 1966. It spoke to an orderly society in which objectivity was valued. This, although still desirable, is perhaps no longer possible. It has been replaced by a certain existential anxiety in which all are implicated. Whether ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’ contains a hidden meaning only Poussin could tell. What it contains for Clark is both simpler and more difficult: unease, even dread. And this was not the sight of death, as the book’s title would have it, but rather fear of the unanticipated, the ultimate accident. Thus the date on which the picture was completed, 1648, was perhaps less relevant than the date on which Clark was making his notes: 2001. This was quite unexpected. The diary format is therefore the only one that mirrors the bewildering changes in Clark’s ‘… reaction … not a theory’.
The classical term for the description of a work of art is ekphrasis, or transliteration. In the 17th and 18th centuries this was considered almost a work of art in its own right: ut pictura poesis erit. This is no longer suitable. Each impression now necessitates further agitated sightings, and in the process Clark’s writing also seems to lose its materiality. And yet he sees perfection (in the old sense) in the impermeability of the classical city, to which the eye progresses from the dark foreground, seen before sunrise, in a manner which Clark rightly understands to be ethical. Above all he is as far removed from comfortable connoisseurship, with its usual signifiers, as it is possible to be, yet what is internalised and noted is rigorously true to what the painter intended the viewer to apprehend. All the stages of recognition are available, are legible: the important components are light and shadow, what they reveal, what they fail to conceal. But none of this is the affair of a moment. Clark asked a bored child in the gallery’s education section what was going on in the picture. ‘Nothing is going on,’ was the reply. Clark had a momentary flash of fellow feeling before he returned to his ferocious scrutiny. One of the features of the painting is its stealthy but continuous disclosure of further detail, evidence, in fact, of further activity which one would like not to intrude. Only the buildings are uninhabited.
By 11 September 2001 Clark was elsewhere, so there are no neat parallels to be drawn. But he kept returning to the picture when he and it were back in London, only to find that the imponderables, the direction of the stream for example, remained imponderable, that there was an expansion, almost a vaporisation, of what was once seen as concrete and unassailable. In a beautiful entry for 17 March he had noted certain dissatisfactions with traditional art history, found its mapping of sources ‘too cheery and efficient’. He suggests that pure speculation, of the most rudimentary kind, might be more helpful. To illustrate this he permits himself a speculation that is right outside the canon. ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’, he says, is about the Fall. The serpent has triumphed. Eve is obliged to take in washing. Adam makes some sort of a living from the river. ‘The boys grow up.’ But in these ‘death-haunted times’ one thing is constant: hence the male figure’s arm raised as if to ward off the threat. And the spectator is with him in this gesture, which may, but only may, have been the painter’s intention.
What this investigation demonstrates is that anything can be broken down but not necessarily put together again. It also demonstrates that Poussin, so often lazily categorised as a ‘peintre-philosophe’, is also a pure maker (look, for example, at the painting of the male figure’s mouth). What it proves — and this is entirely acceptable — is that the best antidote to reading is looking. I paid a further visit to ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’. I did not see one half of what Clark saw. I was conscious that the paint had sunk and the varnish darkened. But I also noticed, with pure pleasure, something about Poussin’s language, or marks, that I had not remarked before. This may have been nothing more than Clark’s influence, but it was proof, if proof were needed, of the validity of this sort of exercise. Forget blockbuster exhibitions: this is the way to see pictures.
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