Reading the Melbourne Poussin

There are two European paintings of the first rank in Australia, both held in the National Gallery of Victoria. One is The Banquet of Cleopatra, arguably Tiepolo’s finest painting—claimed by the art historian Jaynie Anderson to be the greatest work on canvas from the eighteenth century. The other is Nicolas Poussin’s The Crossing of the Red Sea. It is far too little known and appreciated in this country—in part, because it is difficult to understand. My aim here is to introduce this magnificent work to those who don’t know it; and to make it more familiar to those who do. And further, to underline how extraordinarily fortunate we are to have it.

Nicolas Poussin has been known widely as the peintre philosophe. He was singular among the greatest of the Old Masters on that front. The Crossing of the Red Sea is the second, chronologically, of his major philosophical paintings. Poussin was in his fortieth year when he completed it in 1634. It had been preceded by The Plague of Ashdod (1631), in the Louvre, which provides many thematic parallels.

The story is well known, and straightforward, taken from Exodus 14. Moses, having led his people out of Egyptian captivity, reaches the Red Sea, which miraculously parts, allowing the Israelites to pass over, before the sea returns, at Moses’s command, drowning the pursuing Egyptians. Poussin’s version of the story looks like a blend of flight and thanksgiving, as was argued by Franz Philipp in the one previous attempt, as far as I am aware, to develop a detailed narrative reading of this painting. Several preparatory drawings by Poussin for The Crossing of the Red Sea do not help with interpreting the final canvas.

I think Poussin’s interest is deeper and broader, merely using the biblical story as a surface prompt. His perspective is modern—in the sense that it is taking on the big existential meaning questions, without any clear religious presumptions. We have little explicit knowledge about Poussin’s own religious beliefs, outside of what we can intuit from his work. The challenges posed by The Crossing of the Red Sea belong to the same philosophical universe as those put by Hamlet and Don Quixote, which it post-dates by thirty years.

The starting point is universal: a people uprooted from everything familiar, pitched into a journey they know not whither, in fear and trembling, the decisive issue confronting them—what might they believe in, if anything, to sustain them in an unknown future. The journey has the quite explicit initiation motif of crossing over water, under­scoring that the old culture, the culture of the past, is dead. Will there be renewal, some kind of rebirth, or just nothing, Hamlet’s “quintessence of dust”, or Quixote’s deathbed recantation, “my adventures were those of a raving lunatic”? Saved from the captivity of their past lives, their own servitude to every­day ordinariness, what have they been saved for?

To help separate his story from its Old Testament parent, Poussin leaves out, virtually entirely, what comes before and what comes after. The only reference to the destruction of Pharaoh’s pursuing army, which is what the Bible account focuses upon, is hinted at in the bottom right—the lower half of an armed soldier’s corpse being dragged out of the water, and, behind Moses, the faintly visible flotsam of submerged horses, chariots and men. On the left side of the painting, there is no intimation of any utopian end to the Moses-led journey, no sign of an arrival in some Promised Land. On the contrary, the pivotal figure of hope, a standing woman holding her infant on the extreme left, faces Moses—and gestures past him, in the direction of the Egyptian past.

On first viewing, The Crossing of the Red Sea appears forbiddingly cluttered and complicated. And it is gloomily sombre, care of the oppressive black cloud hovering low over the scene. Included are something like eighty-nine figures, orchestrated along a strange spiralling column running from the right foreground to the middle left, then horizontally back across to Moses, before switching back again, across and up, to the left-centre heights. These people compose a typical Poussin crowd: confused, incoherent, dazed and restless, with bodies and heads, and especially arms and hands, flying in all directions. Such is human fear and derangement. Which raises the question central to the painting: What might bring balance and composure, what metaphysical framework to give human life sense, and make it worthwhile? And perhaps the work strays further, into theological territory, of whether there is redemption, and if so what form that might take.

Death

As always with the great works of art that orbit in this philosophical domain, death is never far from centre-stage. Every culture is, in its form, like Christianity, centring on death and its possible transcendence—if not always with such a powerful and enduring symbol of death, the Cross, at its core. Is death merely death, rot and putrefaction, an abrupt and blank termination point, reflecting futility back over the preceding life? Or is there something more? In The Crossing of the Red Sea the ultimate No confronts with the dank meaninglessness of drowning. The generative source is the Egyptian corpse, imposing a dominant diagonal line of force anchored in the foreground, driving up from the bottom right-hand corner, pinning the five men who are looting, shadowing them in a doom that might be called a state of damnation.

In this story, death dons multiple cultural robes. There is paganism, embodied in the first instance by ancient Egypt, with its one representative literally dead. Even his incline is backwards and down, its motion as if sucked under the foaming turbulence, accentuating the death plunge into some ghastly underworld. The body is itself a hollow absence: we see nothing of it except part of a hand and the toes of a skeletal foot, grey-green as if decomposition has already set in. He is rather cloak, breastplate and greave—the steel armour a resplendent outside covering the dead man’s flesh and bones. The tone emanating from the corpse is sinister and gothic.

The second paganism, one far more respected by Poussin, is equally damned. It is that of ancient classical culture. The five scavengers, or looters, in the foreground are exemplars of athleticism, with their perfectly proportioned, muscular bodies modelled on those idealised in Greek sculpture. They move together with a rhythmical power, as if in a dance to the music of time, or sailors hauling in an anchor as they sing a sea-shanty. The figure girthed in blue is suggestive of the archetypal Greco-Roman sculpture of a discus thrower—Poussin would have known of Myron’s famous work but not seen either it, or any of its Roman copies, which were only discovered later. The brass shield balanced in the right hand simulates a discus. The vivid primary colours of the robes we see—yellow, blue and red—might be read, in their strong simplicity, as classical.

The look in the faces of the five men, on close examination, is one of utter horror. The man tugging at the corpse puts all of his strength into the wrestle with death, and it seems more likely he will lose, being sucked down the incline and beneath the waters, which surge around his midriff—his face in recoil, mouth open with terror and eyes glazed over with hopelessness. Immediately behind him, the figure closer to the viewer, with black hair, holds a shield as if in a tender, reverent embrace (maybe imagining it as a raft which will save him from the surging waters); he looks forward furtively, with grim doomed fear, as if not daring to acknowledge what he sees. His immediate companion next to him has his gaze deliberately bolted to the ground, in avoidance, refusing to look.

Behind this pair, the man in blue exposes his right cheek and neck, as if he has just been slapped—by some angel of retribution. His inward look suggests a terrible burden, glimpsing something monstrous inside himself, so he is paralysed in his motion, stopped still, stuck, the strength being leached out of him. He repeats a very similar large figure in The Plague of Ashdod, contorted in the left-foreground, also robed in blue. The central three men in the group are all bent over, under a weight from above, like beasts of burden. There is no allusion here to Atlas—they are not holding up anything, least of all the world. The fifth figure, in a red robe at the rear, kneeling, has partly broken free from the others and looks upwards, attempting to pray. I shall consider him later. The vertical line of his back closes off the left movement of this group.

A third culture is also identified with unredeemable death. Poussin painted a companion, pendant piece to The Crossing of the Red Sea: The Adoration of the Golden Calf, which hangs in the National Gallery in London. It shows an outraged Moses thundering down the mountain, about to smash the stone tablets of the Law to pieces, at the sight of his people dancing around a huge golden statue of a calf. The object of their fickle devotion is less the pagan animal than the turn to pleasure, here a joyful, carefree, sensual abandon, linked to a love of worldly possessions, as symbolised by the gold. This is materialist-hedonist culture, with pleasure, comfort and gorgeous objects its framing values.

In The Crossing of the Red Sea, the wheel has turned, with hedonism now mainly projected in grim hues. The shadows of death have darkened the mood. The fun has gone, replaced by greed, as illustrated by the salvaged weapons stacked behind the man in red. Explicit links to the Adoration come in the golden colour of the looted brass shields; in the dance-like movement of the looters, although now sombre and joyless; in the reverent manner with which the shields are handled; and by a group of a dozen minor figures to the rear, in the middle and higher ground, who are making music and dancing. Here is a cluster of reasons, amongst others, for surmising that The Crossing of the Red Sea was the later painted of the pair.

Grace

The redemptive answer to Death is grace. As it is to the conundrum Poussin and God, the title of a 2015 exhibition presented in the Louvre. Grace is incarnate in The Plague of Ashdod in a little boy nonchalantly entering the scene from bottom right (just the place that death enters The Crossing of the Red Sea). It will recur throughout Poussin’s major work, with notable representations in his first, Cassiano dal Pozzo Sacrament of Confirmation, Matthew and the Angel, The Ashes of Phocion, the Landscape with Diogenes, the London Annunciation, and culminating in Autumn and Winter. Pierre Rosenberg, the foremost Poussin scholar of recent times, has speculated that Poussin’s work became singularly popular in England, where many of the great paintings have ended up, because of some affinity with Protestant rather than Catholic culture. (The Melbourne Poussin was bought in London, in 1948.)

The notion of grace was at the heart of Luther and Calvin’s Reformation. Luther’s divergence from Rome hinged on the concept of sola fide (faith alone), granted as a gift of grace by God. Grace could not be earned through living virtuously. Luther hereby overthrew the Catholic doctrine of works, according to which a person could work their way to heaven after death, by carrying out good works during their life on earth. Calvin extended Luther, with his assertion of predestination, according to which God determined who would be saved, and who damned, and he did so in advance. Further, Calvin placed pivotal emphasis on individual conscience, as the best, if far from perfect, way of knowing God’s will. It followed that the true church, the church of the elect, was “invisible”—its membership known only to God.

Poussin’s intimations of grace are strikingly Calvinist, with grace incarnate in some chosen individuals, although it is unclear where their “chosenness” comes from—it may be inborn rather than a gift of God. Predestination squared this particular circle, by making what was inborn a consequence of God’s will. Modern, secular versions of chosenness, or election, include a spectrum of conceptions of ideal, individual being. Authenticity, for instance, is celebrated in literature, film and philosophy, a kind of genuineness or sincerity. Inner confidence and balance, values with classical Greek roots, are likewise portrayed as a gift—a kind of grace. So too individuals are admired who have faith in their own virtue or rightness, as long as it is justified. And, there is a belief for some that, whatever misfortune strikes, all will be well. Any combination of these qualities may compound the sense of ease of being—of well-being. Poussin’s universality is that his representations of grace might well be conceived of in such contemporary terms.

In Poussin’s work, it is only through reading the narrative in the painting—and especially the demeanour, gestures and facial expressions of the pictured individuals—that we may decipher their psychic, or spiritual condition. The painter’s driving aim, to my mind, lies precisely here, in such quests in search of grace. Furthermore, Poussin wrote:

Things that partake of perfection should not be looked at in haste, but call for time, judgment and intelligence. The same means used in their appraisal must be the same as those used in their making.

With The Crossing of the Red Sea it is better not to look at all, than look in haste.

Jacques Thuillier, Poussin’s biographer, noted that “election” is one of the painter’s most important themes. But Thuillier was referring to a quite different election, that of fortune, and the capricious way this pagan supernatural force intervenes in individual lives, fatefully and irrevocably changing their direction. Without doubt, fortune, and its diabolically fickle ways, is a major Poussin interest; but so too, and quite differently, is the cast of election sourced in Calvinist grace.

Poussin et Dieu, the catalogue to the 2015 exhibition in the Louvre, takes up the question of Poussin’s religious disposition. Across diverging essays, there is a general conclusion about “an artist of great spirituality”. Thuillier had argued in 1994, in a debate in Paris Figaro, that grace in the strict religious sense is absent from the work. Poussin’s truths are not those of Christian revelation. Marc Fumaroli responded that Poussin may not have been inspired by the Holy Spirit, but he was inspired by the divine. My reading of Poussin is closer to Fumaroli than to Thuillier.

Another essay in the 2015 collection was titled “Des grâces visibles aux grâces secrètes”, by Poussin scholar Alain Mérot. “Secret grace” sounds Calvinist, allied to the invisible church of the elect, in comparison with the more Catholic “visible grace”. But Mérot’s stress is upon a Counter-Reformation sense of an inexplicable grace, one of the heart. His Poussin is more poet than philosopher—poet of the ineffable. It is hard to argue with this point of view, but a notion of ineffable spirituality is too vague to mean much. And “philosopher” better captures than “poet” the extraordinary intellectual rigour and thoroughness that goes into Poussin’s major works. He famously remarked about his work: “I have neglected nothing.”

Let us return to The Crossing of the Red Sea. Grace is incarnate in the mother and child. She turns back to face Moses, and looks, as if through him, and beyond across the raging waters. She takes in what was, what is, and what will be—the tragic past, the cataclysmic present, and the uncertain future. She is calm and composed, digesting and reflecting; she does not flee. One of Poussin’s most beautiful later landscapes will be titled Calm.

A vast black cloud hovers low and menacing over Moses and the Israelites. It is suggestive of an angry, powerful God. In the Bible story, divine fury is manifestly pitched against Pharaoh and the pursuing Egyptians, whom it annihilates. In this scene, it seems more generalised, and even directed at the fleeing Jews, with three fingers of cloud jutting down at them. The mother is indifferent to the oppressive cloud, her gesturing arm projecting a calm force across the scene, establishing a horizontal vector of composed power across the human mayhem, a vector that uses Moses and his own gesturing left hand as if they are the sights of a rifle.

Grace is in the sublime rhythm of her left arm, indicating, directing and blessing. It seems to say: There you are; contemplate the fury and the destruction; accept the deliverance by powers beyond our knowing; trust, for if you can keep your feet, all will be well. Grace is in the head tilted slightly back, and the gaze ranging out and across, passing just above Moses’s head, and piercing the narrow space out to the right of the scene between the low cloud and the tempestuous sea. It is in the strong right forearm and hand steadying the infant. The baby is also composed, unthreatened—in fact, his gaze down the death incline is compassionate, one of worried concern for those who are doomed.

This mother has a supporting entourage, reinforcing and amplifying her presence. Two kneeling women close by, one with a young girl fearfully clutching her, seem like companions. So too does a third woman, in red, standing in her shadow, balancing a voluminous baggage parcel on her head. The next, linking figure is an alert woman in blue just forward from them, whose pointing right arm repeats the mother’s gesture, and with some of the same nonchalance. She is partnered by a woman to her left looking up in astonishment, tilting backwards and trying to ward off the destroying black force from above with her open left hand (the gesture picking up that of the praying man in red in the foreground). She holds the arm of a terrified tiny child; but in spite of her own recoiling fear she is not discomposed.

Continuing on, placed at the midpoint from mother to Moses, two youths are crouching together, intimately. They may represent friendship—perhaps as a saving virtue, given a spirit of reverence that emanates from them. One of them points forward as he rests his other, right hand gently on his friend’s shoulder. Further on again, two kneeling women on the water’s edge lean forward in devoted and fearful awe, staring out to sea—under the stabilising authority of the mother’s vector passing just over their heads, and impelling them forwards. A third woman, half-linked to them, is more anxiously erect, praying, with a naked child clinging onto her back.

The intensity of the pointing arms and fearful looks is multiply-repeated to fuel the momentum from left to right, along the mother’s vector. It suggests there is something monstrous out to the right, and maybe far out to the right, well beyond the painted scene. What might it be, hovering over the Red Sea? It is more than the raging waters. Is it a fata morgana, a demonic phantasm, or some sublime dark presence indicative of the savage god? Here lies the mystery within the painting.

I have singled out those among the Israelites who have the inner resources to withstand this moment of cataclysmic confrontation—of initiation. They might be called the chosen ones. Most of the others in the scene have been pitched into a state of deranged dread, some fleeing with their meagre belongings, others pausing to look back, some to wave in bleak confusion some kind of blind gratitude for their survival. It is the moment when all may pause, having reached dry land, and reflect on where and who they might be.

Those who have paused, most obviously, are the ancillary and much smaller figures in the middle, settled on higher ground. One group of a dozen or so are celebrating the escape by playing music and dancing—we can make out a harp, cymbals, tambourine, a stringed instrument, and a couple of wind instruments. Their take on events is profane and hedonistic: let’s now have some fun. They are contrasted with a group on a hilly promontory directly above them, praying, if in a much more relaxed manner than the larger figures in the main body of the painting. For them, the fear has gone. At their rear, a mysterious turbaned man on horseback sits in the shadows. He seems to be some kind of observer. There is no suggestion of Poussin making a judgment between the two groups; it seems rather that he is merely noting that, after temporary deliverance, there are different responses, and some will pray, and some will celebrate.

Of the many smaller, ancillary figures in The Crossing of the Red Sea, two others stand out. To the right of the revellers, and on one plane down, two men, one in blue, one in red, are speeding down the hill towards another group of looters—or should we rather say that they are salvaging what is rightfully theirs, given years of Egyptian captivity. The man in blue is pointing, it seems in judgment, his lightly-bearded chin jutting forward in disapproval. His target seems to be the looters. It is also possible that he is looking beyond the plundering Israelites, at the sea, and the punishment that is being wreaked on the Egyptians. If anything, these two men represent just one more absurd human response to a world being turned upside down, with them contriving to find some purpose, however arbitrary. Their posturing underscores the determining reality, that the one still-point in this universe is the mother.

Moses and the in-between

The Crossing of the Red Sea is a supremely musical work. Lines of force ebb and flow, carrying the helpless humans with them—the one exception being the mother and child. There are two defining poles—the mother and Moses—between which the current flows contrapuntally, firstly right to left, then left to right. It is accompanied by the foreground diagonal, which the child looks down, terminating in the Egyptian corpse. Death surges and sucks, like an angry whirlpool. Dark clouds brood above, pressing downwards to dispatch one type of judgment.

The first movement of the painting is directed by the authority of Moses and his Old Testament God. The two largest fingers of black cloud press forwards and down on the looters, and especially the three bent over. The third finger, the one on the right, has thrust downwards to target, if symbolically, the Egyptian soldier, to drown him and annihilate an entire army.

Moses, in his first mode, looks up and waves in acknowledgment and gratitude to his God, as he turns his back on the past life in Egyptian captivity. However, in spite of what should be a moment of triumph, the gesture is weak. It is the left arm and hand, not the hand of authority, and the palm is defencelessly open and exposed, with fingers splayed indecisively apart. The contrast is with the mother’s poised and commanding left hand. The feebleness is complemented by the thinness of the staff that Moses holds, and that it is not in the vertical.

Moses, in his second mode, is waving farewell to his God, an anxious and melancholy farewell, as if abandoned, losing protector and patron, left adrift on the banks of a new land. It is an angry God; and, given the thrust of the narrative, it is a dying God whose time is over.

Time passes in the human story; eras come and go. The separation of mortals from their fading God anticipates Spring, the first of Poussin’s cycle of Four Seasons, his own departing work, completed a year or so before his death in 1665. In Spring, the theme is reversed, with God waving farewell, as he departs the human world—realising that humans, led by Adam and Eve, will have no further need of him, as they are about to gain knowledge, and above all the knowledge of good and evil. By the way, it was a prescient observation of Luther’s that to grant Reason power—as the humanist Renaissance required—would render God, in the end, superfluous.

A closer look at Moses’s face in profile shows thick-set, swarthy features, in part derived from Michelangelo’s monumental marble Moses in Rome, as are the powerful neck and arms. In the Poussin, the mouth is slightly open, the eyes tortured and grief-stricken. The overall impression is one of shock, tinged with some anger and bitterness. There is no sign of panic; no inclination to flight. Rather Moses’s response to his God is one of pained sadness. Feeling betrayed, it is as if he is protesting, Why have you abandoned me, done this to me! Further, this Moses looks obtuse, not very bright.

Poussin continues his journey through competing cultures. The Judeo-Christian has superseded the Egyptian and the Greco-Roman classical. Now the Christian supersedes the Jewish. The mother and child are suggestive—she robed in blue—of the Madonna and the infant Jesus. This is not literal: they might just as well be read as the archetypal mother and child, as represented, in idealised form, in the Christian Holy Family. Then again, nothing is certain: maybe they are simply this mother and this child.

Returning to Moses, we may begin to see his foothold as precarious, with a wave about to crash over him. The finger of black cloud low over his head presses down, singling him out as much as it does the dead Egyptian. Moses is cramped in a pincer movement between cloud finger and crashing wave. The pair of figures closest to him, leaning away from storm and waves, also lean away from him, and set up, by means of a kind of magnetic attraction, an anti-clockwise motion that has Moses himself, in the next imagined scene, in rotation, pitching down to join the cycle of looters, starting with the praying man in red, following its downward rhythm around an arc, to conflate with the first looter, with whom he shares similarities of size and robing. It is as if Moses tips into this man, becoming him, and then slips beneath the waves with the Egyptian corpse. Perhaps the infant looking down the incline foresees all of this, a Jesus association—and he does so with sadness. His compassion is for Moses, who will join the dead.

Two powerful lines of force, working contrapuntally, rule the painting. There is the vector sourced in the mother, thrusting to the right, carried and amplified by the figures under her authority, starting with her companions, picked up by the woman in blue, then on to the pair of friends, and finally relayed by the women on the edge of the sea leaning forward. Poussin is like a master magician, who has somehow managed, by his positioning of figures, and orchestration of gestures and expressions, to conjure up an invisible, supernatural force thrusting across the scene from left to right.

The counter-movement begins in Moses and his left hand. It moves through his head and staff, picks up the fleeing pair next to him, the woman in green looking up through Moses’s hand and beyond in horror, mouth open. Moving over their heads and back across the scene, it connects with the raised left arm of the woman just in front of the mother, tilting backwards in fear, trying to ward off the force of destruction driving at her from the right. Her defensive hand has fingers weakly splayed apart, mirroring those of Moses. The movement continues on to the adjacent man in red attempting to pray. There is a further pairing here, on opposite sides of the canvas, like to like—in the raised arms, the volume and shape of the hands, and the indecisive fingers. Moses’s thick hatch of hair is mimicked in the white turban. The angular momentum then swings round and down an arc joining with the other four looters.

We are still to consider the pivot figure of the praying man in red, the third key figure in the painting. He seems to represent a different orientation to the salvation-damnation dialectic directing the story. Having seen the divine power above, and the imminence of its capacity to damn and destroy, he has freed himself from his fellow looters. He rocks backwards, kneeling securely, his torso in the vertical. Oblivious to the redeeming mother and child, he seems drawn, in part, unwittingly upwards towards them, as he is also back towards his four companions, as if torn between two competing forces.

He is the means by which Poussin poses the question of whether insight into the truth, followed by remorse, may change the individual’s psychic condition. To put it in grander philosophical terms, may being be reformed by knowledge? Is it possible for a person to change himself or herself, to become a better person, or one more receptive to metaphysical illumination—that is, in Lutheran categories, more receptive to saving grace? Luther and Calvin would answer in the negative; both the Catholic and humanist traditions in the positive.

What about Poussin? The left finger of cloud has singled this man out. He has freed himself from his damned companions, and his body appears steady in its erectness. Yet, his praying gesture is weak; an attempt in which the fingers and hands will just not seem to make the fluid upwards motion of prayer. This sign is negative, of trying but failing. There is no grace in him, his face swarthy, his expression one of wide-eyed pleading, brows taught with tension.

Judas is the Gospel example of what may be this kind of damnation: Judas the one who has insight into the truth that matters—in his case, the nature of Jesus—but who is unable to transform himself into a like state of being, and so, finds himself in a condition of inconsolable bitterness, and reduced to the envious need to destroy what he himself cannot be. There is no sign in Poussin’s praying man of envy, not yet. But his state does seem more likely to be the tragic one represented by Judas, worse than that of any of the other followers of Jesus—for he knows the hopelessness of seeing clearly that he cannot be the one thing he desires.

The Red Sea is not Poussin’s last word on Moses, far from it. There are numerous later paintings centring on Moses as a baby—a baby with charismatic presence. But the most striking contrast comes four years later than The Crossing of the Red Sea, in The Israelites Gathering Manna, in the Louvre. Moses is unambiguously the redeeming power, the authoritative still-point around which a crowded and hectic scene orbits. If the artist has any animus in 1634, I suspect it is against monotheism, not the culture of the Jews. In the Red Sea, he chooses a well-known story which suits his purpose, one with a Raphael precedent, and he uses it as a vehicle for his explorations on the nature of grace.

The mystery within the painting is absent, as I have mentioned—out of the canvas to the right, likely far to the right. What dwells there? Is the mother taking a nonchalant, distant look into the eye of the storm, in awe of its sublime force? It is as if she was born out of this dark cataclysm, conceived in the furnace of destruction, the source of her initiation into maturity, which is now. She stares into the eyes of Genesis:

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

If Poussin is indeed building in creation—which would explain the dark brooding mood of the painting—he may be cycling birth into death, in timeless embrace. Then the mother’s state is ambivalent: drawn in part back towards death, in fascination, driven by what Freud termed a universal “death instinct”, or Nietzsche an irrepressible human will to self-destruction. At the same time, and in contradistinction, she seems to challenge: If I can withstand this, even in the role of participating witness, then I can take anything that fate, or whatever, may dish up. Look, my presence, and that of my son, quells the Power, taming it, and leaves us free to be as we are, and move with equanimity wherever the life-journey may take us. Her grace shines.

I need to mention the pillar of fire, shown as an orange-brown vertical column running down the right border of the canvas, looking more like a beam of wood. There is controversy over the authenticity of this pillar. During a complete restoration of the painting in 2011-12, it was painted back in. The conservators at the National Gallery of Victoria, under the lead of Carl Villis, did a superb job—giving new clarity and vividness, restoring much of the detail, and especially the clouds, from age, wear, old varnish, and mistakes in prior restorations. They were aided by a replica of The Crossing of the Red Sea, painted in the 1680s, and attributed to the most celebrated French painter of the era, Charles Le Brun.

A number of copies of the Red Sea were made in the period circa 1680 to circa 1740, when the painting was in Paris—the original, commissioning Italian owner, Amedeo dal Pozzo, having died in 1644. The reason for the numerous copies was the peerless reputation of Poussin as the master of masters, and the high standing of this particular work. The Red Sea replica has only been discovered recently, in the United States in 2009, and is a remarkably faithful copy of the original. However, it does not include the column of fire—strong evidence against its authenticity, given Le Brun’s singular and extraordinary respect for Poussin, a respect shared by the French Academy at the time. It is unlikely that Le Brun, or indeed any member of the Academy, would have been so radically presumptuous as to change such an important detail. Furthermore, another faithful copy, in the form of an engraving by Etienne Gantrel, also from the 1680s, does not include the pillar.

A third copy has survived that does include the pillar of fire—a Gobelins tapestry from 1685, which is generally less accurate in its detail. Perhaps of significance too, Poussin’s most obvious prompt for his version of the story, a wildly histrionic fresco of The Crossing of the Red Sea by Raphael, in the Vatican, does contain a very unconvincing, if not ludicrous, electric pillar of fire in the middle of the scene. It tells, if anything, against Poussin including an equivalent shaft of divine fire.

Carl Villis’s main argument for restoring the pillar was that during cleaning he had found original paint—suggesting that Poussin had, in the first instance, included it. It is possible, however, that Poussin painted it out at a later stage—we know he did this with other details in the painting: for instance, he reversed one head. Anthony Blunt reported seeing the pillar before the painting was cleaned in London in 1947. In the next restoration, it was excluded. Blunt did support the inclusion of the pillar—although he refers to it as a pillar of cloud—on the grounds it symbolised God, to whom Moses was expressing gratitude.

The main problem with the pillar of fire is that it looks stiff and contrived—awkwardly rigid on the border of this very fluent canvas. Furthermore, the narrative does not need it; and worse, it blocks the line of force, sourced in the mother, projecting from left to right, and beyond the frame. Poussin disdained the superfluous. I think it more likely that Poussin came to a similar conclusion, and painted it out, a view that is supported by the Le Brun replica and the Gantrel engraving.