The Mysteries of Phocion
Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion (detail), by Nicolas Poussin (1648)
A few weeks ago, Édouard paid a visit to the Poussin and Nature show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he took a very good look at the picture from which I have extracted a detail, above, Poussin’s Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion. Who, Édouard asked, is that man in over on the right, holding on to a tree?
Pourquoi a-t-il une telle tête de fou ou de psychosé ? On ne sait pas.
Nobody knows? How can that be? Surely a painter as dutifully programmatic as Poussin, painting in an age of highly articulate iconography, must have had a reason for putting that madman in his picture, and, even more, for so dramatically turning the head of the attendant woman, her left hand splayed out in caution or alarm, in his direction? I thought I’d read up on Phocion, an Athenian so unknown to me that I wasn’t quite sure whether he was mythical or actual.
A jolly good idea — but I’m still reading. So far, indeed, “nobody knows” — there’s no explanation for the boy in the trees. I’m plodding through Plutarch, wondering if the figure might be that of Phocion’s son, Phocos — not a good sort, according to the Life. What is emerging, however, is the portrait of a man whom you’d think would be made more of. The Roman parallel to Phocion in Plutarch is Cato the Younger, but Cincinnatus is the man who really comes to mind. (Maybe that’s just proof that my mind isn’t very well stocked.) Whatever his appeal to Poussin’s grandee patrons, you’d think that Phocion would have registered more palpably with our Founders. The operator of a lathe by profession, Phocion broke the record for serving as Athenian strategos, or elected general, in the Fourth Century BCE. How American is that?
