Landscape with Saint John on Patmos
Nicolas Poussin (French, 1594–1665)
1640
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 100.3 × 136.4 cm (39 1/2 × 53 5/8 in.); Framed: 128.3 × 164.5 × 12.1 cm (50 1/2 × 64 3/4 × 4 3/4 in.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- A. A. Munger Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
In Christian tradition, Saint John the Evangelist is thought to be the youngest of Christ’s twelve disciples—but Nicolas Poussin depicted him here as an elderly man. The disciple has retired to the Greek island of Patmos to write the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation; he is shown at work with his attribute, an eagle, just behind him. Poussin constructed an idealized landscape, shaping natural forms according to geometric principles and reinforcing the measured order of the composition by arranging them parallel to the picture plane. The resulting serene setting is replete with references to Greco-Roman civilization, including column fragments, an obelisk, and a temple. For Poussin and his friends and patrons, Christianity was closely linked to Stoic philosophy, which emphasized reason, unity, and serenity.
Scholars now regard Poussin’s art, more than that of any other seventeenth-century European artist, as synonymous with classicism, the philosophy that prized the model of ancient Greek and Roman art and architecture. Born in France, Poussin spent most of his career in Rome, painting for an educated elite. Along with Landscape with Saint Matthew (Gemäldegalerie,…
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
