Poussin, Autumn

Evening is a process, a procession, the death-procession of the sun into his nighttime abode. (What is the significance that one word for for evening in Greek is εὐφρόνη, derived from the word for ‘merriment’ or ‘joyous festivity’?) I think much of the melancholy we derive from the painting originates in its setting during the sun-fall. Panofsky writes of the

vespertinal mixture of sadness and tranquillity which is perhaps Virgil's most personal contribution to poetry. With only slight exaggeration one might say that he "discovered" the evening. At the end of Virgil’s Eclogues we feel evening silently settle over the world…

If Poussin’s grey-blue is the blue of summer’s death, a wholly different blue is the blue of the winter evening. Look to the medievals in their early landscape work in breviaries and Books of Hours. This deep aquamarine of the sky is utter enchantment, utter wonder…far from the enervated lull of Poussin’s autumn ennui. After landscape in Books of Hours were made obsolete, and Medievalism as a whole went out of fashion, the rapturous blue was hardly noticeable until Van Gogh. When Eliade writes that

simple contemplation of the celestial vault already provokes a religious experience. A religious sense of the the divine transcendence is aroused by the very existence of the sky.

it was an ekphrasis of that rich evening blue — not a trace of which can be found in the airy Mediterranean sky.