That June it rained every day for a fortnight, the drops chill through the ajar window, the gusts lifting sometimes to reveal a heavy and nondescript mildness. In Berlin friends burnt their dogs’ feet just taking them for walks and the Spree choked with swimmers. A few weeks later, he was staying in a market town of Georgian limestone. He walked through a balmy early evening in a Victorian park, watching a spaniel run up the hill for a ball. The sheltered benches were dotted with discarded rice, empty Fanta cans, graffiti tags. He was working one and a half jobs, neither of them paid the rent. The unseasonal tree pollen made his eyes itch. It was early in the century and late in the history of reification. What a previous age’s revolutionaries had called mere “survival” wasn’t especially thinkable now, cardboard mirages of modernist housing blocks or images of canned goods with the radiance of Russian ikons. In a month the Amazon would be outlined in dark grey.

***

In the National Gallery’s collection of paintings by Nicolas Poussin are two small canvases. Landscape with a Man Scooping Water from a Stream (1637) and Landscape with Travellers Resting (1638-9) are both 63 x 78 cm. Though he painted them a year apart for the same patron, the scholar and art collector Cassiano dal Pozzo, they seemingly weren’t intended as part of a pair or series. Unlike later pendants like The Funeral of Phocion and The Ashes of Phocion Collected by his Widow (both 1648), painted when Poussin’s treatment of landscape had more fully developed, the difference in space and figures between the two panels doesn’t describe a narrative movement, but variations on a theme. The tight s-curl of the road in Travellers Resting reverses and shifts into the background the fat arc, hemmed in by a small hill and trees in the left foreground, of Man Scooping Water. While his history paintings isolate more or less significant moments of narrative time, here the picture seems to freeze extensive and abstract space.

The landscape, then an incidental and new category in painting, gathers history and nature into a single, uneven image. But neither, here, are fixed or placeable. The sense of anachronism that forms an unremarked fact of history painting – the early modern period looking back on antiquity and managing only some of the details – doesn’t function as expected. The sense of temporal distinction is flattened and softened. Their allusions to the ancient world and Arcadian myth refuse to yield up the temporal perspective they promise. The landscape, meanwhile, blurs the boundary between given nature and human settlement, as if the natural world had already passed through the processing of art or manufacturing. They present a puzzle not through the strong presentation of unexplained or incongruent elements, but the masking and de-emphasis of what would make it legible and meaningful within the codes of history painting.

The colours are muted, a careful and narrow band of browns shading through to the off-white of limestone. Man Scooping Water feels close to sunset with the lengthy shadows covering the path in the foreground, while Travellers Resting is overcast, weak sun illuminating the background section of path where a walker in a red toga is about to pass behind a rock. But it’s hard to tell what time of day it is: a long and gloomy Mediterranean afternoon, the gloaming when the horizon begins to clear, a mid-morning interval before the sun shines again. (The foreground darkness of Man Scooping Water even suggests an early autumn morning, but doesn’t push for it.) But the key note is one of belatedness, a dying away or attenuation of vividness, even as the paintings studiously refuse to give any clues as to what they come after. Compare with a mature history painting, even one which evades any specific framework from classical literature, such as Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (1648), usually hung nearby at the National. An event structures the landscape, contained in the black ribbon of the near-foreground: a man dead in a snake’s coils, another flinching from it as he runs by. The gradation of shades, running through to the hard white on the squat towers in the far distance, the hurry of the washerwoman and the fishermen in the bottom third, mark it out as a rural morning. But in the two small landscapes, nothing has ever happened or will. Travellers sit with their feet splayed out. The clouds seem as immovable as stone.

But this isn’t quite right. For, as noted, they project an effect of the past, of temporal transience in their treatment of historical nature. The paintings rework elements from the classical tradition that recur throughout Poussin’s body of work. In the second version of The Arcadian Shepherds, painted around the same time, light is imbricated with death. In a scene taken from Virgil’s Eclogues (44-38 BC), three shepherds in classical dress scrutinise a phrase chiselled on a tomb. In his essay on the painting, art historian Erwin Panofsky reads Poussin’s interpretation of Virgil as one of elegy, excavating a quality, a “vespertinal mixture of sadness and tranquility”, the poet associates with evening. The body in the grave speaks through its epitaph of the pleasures and regrets it felt in the past, not the bald fact of extinction in the present. In the later Arcadia, clouds mass in the picture’s upper right corner and in a rivulet of palest yellow the sun outlines the hills for a last time. In Virgil, this ordinary passage of days and seasons – the “factuality” of nature in Arcadia – forms a backdrop that robs “frustrated love and death” of their gravity while acknowledging them as part of the scene – a burden of suffering that Poussin projects “from the present into the past”, leaving nature as an independent but necessary prop for “quiet, reminiscent meditation”. The temporal and historical effect dissipates in the very same movement by which it appears, imaging a damage to historical nature its aesthetic closure itself hides. The odd undecidability of light in the two small landscapes introduce this classical tradition and the licence it allows for melancholy, whimsy, the emotional playacting of costumed swains, and erase them, leaving only blurred or faint traces. Time may well pass here – it must, whether the footsore travellers or the man bent over a stream like it or not – but towards dawn or dusk, past or future, they don’t know. The sky, which as TJ Clark writes is in Poussin “the whole state of the picture plane… not a remote but a proximate fact”, gives no sense of space: the clouds, in spite of the patches of burring at their edges, are like transparencies compressed into a single surface. The ground, so clear in its orientation and the marks of human settlement that carve through it, is tinged with unreality: a factual space that can’t be integrated into a whole world. Death, which makes the time of narrative possible by giving it an ending, condemning certain things to memory even in Arcadia, dissolves: Poussin doesn’t deny its factuality, but it hovers unanchored in the picture, without a local habitation or a name. Time persists, fatally, but without duration, in a nature disjointed from the natural.

***

What always impressed me about these two small landscapes was their generic quality. Not just in the sense that the genres of Western painting since the Quattrocento had been structured by the mastery, borrowing and reworking of existent tropes and techniques. Poussin’s work redoubled that relationship to the past. When he first arrived in Rome he was part of a circle of painters, patrons and scholars that sought to classicise the wild stylistic disjunctures of the Baroque. Coming nearly a century after the major painters of the Florentine and Venetian Renaissance produced an artistic language for the remains of the classical world, the icy control that sometimes appears over the strict harmony of his compositions seems like a pang of anxiety: a belated experience of belatedness. His was the first century to see in the values of Renaissance painting the strictures of a tradition, ones that would be absorbed straight into the French academy from Poussin.

The theory of naturalism at the heart of Renaissance innovations in oil painting was one of original observation. New forms of linear perspective and modelling related the contents of the easel to those an external world that did not depend in its essence on the past – its particularity was its contingency. The emergent art culture of Renaissance Europe – the conventions of artistic training, patronage, the market, theory – mediated between this focus on originality and the medium’s increasing mass production and serialisation. The genres of painting, by allowing play within given models, kept at bay the freezing of art into mere product. The appearance of the generic as a specific feature of painting is thus a sign of the breaking of its integrity – the intensification of the forces genre was supposed to manage, past its ability to bind that tension. For John Berger, writing in 1972, the achievements of oil painting are what break through genre, as the system of managing appearances for the market. The meaning of the easel picture is that “[b]efore they are anything else, they are themselves objects which can be bought and owned”, conferring ownership of “the thing it represents”. The structure of the tradition and its genres constrains but also gives impetus to work like Rembrandt’s late self-portraits, in which “he has turned the tradition against itself”. The meaning of the generic emerges only in its negation, in the rupture that sustains the romantic notion of the artist as self-determining author of his style. The generic as an immediate fact, decoupled from a contingency to transform or determine, stands out as an expression of the tradition, but one that the tradition itself can’t make legible.

That this generic quality should arise in minor Poussins is telling and perhaps productive. Emerging at the point where the market shapes the artwork in its devaluation, it discloses something that underpins the cover story of “the lie of the grand style”, as Nietzsche put it. The modern theory of organic form would see here the rigidity of exchange value freezing and denaturing of the supposedly natural unity of the artist’s style. But the division between nature and artifice, between particularity and its appearance, can’t be formed here. Poussin worked from plein air views of the Roman campagna, such that there is no natural, original material prior to his expression, to congeal into dead objects. The very landscape must live with this autonomy of the generic. What we’re left with is the eerie way, anticipating the empty cities of Giorgio de Chirico, they leave human habitation amid the facts of nature as an unresolved existent that can’t be seen as becoming or process. 

Poussin’s figures look like tourists to the antique hills. Their primary-coloured togas fall about them a bit too neatly to be convincing as weary travellers, striding, at first glance, with the composed carefreeness of Anthropologie models. That the world of the history paintings that made his reputation is a secondhand impression taken from the classical sources of his education and his experience in Rome is no surprise; the sense of anachronism here is barely noticeable compared with the crenellated castle walls of Landscape with a Calm (1650-51) or the distant round city towers of Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, much less the fashion choices of his early Baroque predecessors. As Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood note, anachronism was a feature of early modern art that pointed to a “substitutional” model of aesthetic time, one that occurs parallel to the stylistic chronological markers of art history. The Renaissance partly “proposed the perfect interchangeability of one image or work for another”, so that the Roman friezes and sarcophagi from which Poussin took bacchantes and mourners were somehow present in the frigid space of the easel painting: “the prior is no longer prior but present”. The explicit classicising of A Roman Road (1648), the diptych’s more elaborate counterpart, is the 1640s’ version of a Renaissance schema for rendering the landscape of 15 centuries beforehand. 

Yet the “plural temporality” of art itself refers back through the image of antiquity to a series of recessed times. Pagan culture made important distinctions between its present and the period of myth, the ages of worldly genesis and heroism as Hesiod codified them. Arcadia literalises and makes spatial the ancestral descent of the present from the Golden Age, in which nature provided abundantly without cultivation. If, for art history after Aby Warburg, the classical inheritance, which flowed into Renaissance art like warming blood into a body, was associated with a vitalising attention to nature, it also contained a temporal depth that was a mark of a fall from bounty. This was part of the meaning of Et in arcadia ego: nature in its first and formless, unconscious radiance bore within itself the burden of historicity as incipient death. For Poussin, the splendour and harmony of the classical world contains its own anachronic future as ruins: an anecdote records him “reaching down among the ruins for a handful of marble and porphyry chips and saying to a tourist: ‘Here’s ancient Rome.’” The absence of Pan – bearer of fertility – and other mythical theatrics from the small landscapes at once invokes and cancels this natural temporality: the generic artificiality of the landscape, its coalescence into what Walter Benjamin called “second nature”, carries mythic nature within itself as a repressed memory. They bespeak a natural time – the time of these landscapes and their aesthetic life – that can no longer be said to have ever been natural.

Only one among the foreground figures stands upright, walking off stage left in the background of Travellers. He seems to be mid-stride, getting ready to swing forward the left leg currently trailing behind him, holding loosely a bundle of leaves in his left hand. In the far background of Man Scooping Water, another man in a blue toga similarly seems to move along on thin legs and, behind him, two uprights in yellow and red with fleshy dots for heads stand just outside the outline of a settlement. Clark places at the centre of Poussin’s “anthropology” human bipedality, which “inflects and informs the whole texture of human doings”. Humanity’s place in natural history comes to be encoded in this strange separation from the ground, levered up from the horizontal, precariously balanced in motion, still bearing, while trying to transcend, the dregs of creatureliness. As Clark notes, the central formal fact of easel painting, linear perspective and extensity, is made possible by this position off the ground, even if it disavows it. Landscape is only landscape, available to sight as an uneven and structured whole, because of the human body’s place within and against it.

Against the uprights of the trees, the foreground figures lapse and loll to the horizontal. The utterly minimal drama of Man Scooping Water consists in this bending and folding in proximity to the earth. The bearded man sits on the edge of the track, one foot close to him and the other leg stretched, propping himself up on one elbow, looking laterally to the yellow-togaed youth who supports himself on his right knee and left arm, apparently disappearing into the stream but certainly blocked from view by its shallow bank. With his right extended arm he cups a dish into the water, eyes fixed on the surface. It isn’t just the oddly unemphatic, unhurried actions of survival here – water and rest – but the strange way they dispose themselves and make contact with the ground. There’s tension in the waiting old man’s pose, his torso upright and seemingly turned away from his hips, as if shifting his left leg. Looking closer at his feet, it’s unclear how they meet the ground, floating proximate to the undiscriminated brown muck of the surface. The camber of the track’s bank disappears beneath him, but Poussin gives very little indication of its height and angle relative to the path; his elbow hovers next to a dun green bush, but there’s no sense of the shelf of grass taking his weight. More than this, the narrative logic of their apparent actions has no real issue, leaving this world’s only activity suspended between subsistence and flourishing. Here society itself consists in the bare life of a minimal distance from the scraped and grubbed earth, the road seeming to have nothing to do with the little fortifications in the far distance.

Travellers makes a similar play with curvature and lowness, uncertainty and scale. The path’s borders, seemingly sloping up to meet the rocks on either side, lose their sense of angle in brown flats, the only indication of any climb being the shadow cast by the left foot of the traveller in the yellow robe, that indicates a slope against which it falls. The unfurling motion of the track relates the travellers in an uneven triangle, but the way that it organises the recession of the ground-plane in relation to the verticals of the two cliffs makes them all seem to be on the same level with the path. The traveller in the blue tunic hunches over his sandal as he ties it, one foot splayed out, the sole dirty. Far from preparing to set out on the road again, he seems ready to flop face-first to the earth like one of Homer’s lotus-eaters. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer note, the floral idyll that Odysseus must escape is one of a pre-rational merging with nature, “an illusion of bliss, a dull aimless vegetating, as impoverished as the life of animals”. And yet, Poussin’s nature never exactly threatens to absorb the individuality of his figures. (How quaint, how un-PC.) The disturbing glimpses of actuality that find their way into the cold framework of the paintings are local facts to be integrated into an overriding vision of the world, like the patches of natural beauty – the semblance of how leaves move in the wind, the flash of a bird’s wing as it turns – still visible in the artificiality of kitsch. Although the road, that mark of human history forcing itself through the landscape, seems to almost rise up to take them, it runs in parallel to the structure of the rocky and grassed ground, not in place of it. Compare with A Roman Road: there the poignant smudges of dust and old brick, travellers kneeling and slouching in the foreground, bespeaks the entwinement of nature and humanity’s production of a place for itself in the world, in what Marx called the “prehistory” that is class society. Human shelter and building is ephemeral and partial by comparison with the trees and sky, but no-one, in Poussin’s rendition of archaic society there, seriously considers the relationship one of a hard-fought domination over nature. The scars of environmental industry – images of a future planetary proletarianisation – are visible but controlled. The possibility of a conscious and rational abiding with nature hangs alongside the wearied practices of everyday life. The moment of Travellers and Man Scooping Water is at once far earlier and far later. It is a world in which the facts of the human habitus and a nature that can never give man a place in it have become mirror images. It is a world without hinterlands or “underdeveloped” zones to escape to, saturated by a human history that no longer belongs properly to humanity. 

It is, in other words, a landscape in which we see ourselves, surrounded by the banal facts of a nature remade in mergered and administrated humanity’s image, for which the shorthand “Anthropocene” fashionably names and elides its anachronic self-displacement. Hence, perhaps, the paintings’ displacement from myth, their ambiguous anachronism. Their own historicity, held in mythic time as the future memory of death, is inaccessible to them, wearing the garbs of antiquity as just so much fashion. This world remembers Arcadia, which, as Adorno and Horkheimer write of Circe’s magic and the Lotus-eaters, “recalls them [Odysseus’s sailors] to an idealized prehistory [and] not only makes them animals but brings about, in however delusive a form, a semblance of reconciliation”, but recalls it only as semblance. The common wealth that Arcadia promises, a life without scarcity, appears but is nowhere admissible: mythic eternity becomes a stasis robbed of enchantment, foreshadowing a 21st century temporality that Jonathan Crary describes as “a time without time, a time extracted from any material or identifiable demarcations, a time without sequence or recurrence.” The Anthropocenic image inverts Heidegger’s claim that language makes Dasein’s place in the world: “Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of being insofar as they bring this manifestation to language and preserve it in language through their saying.” Here humanity, having remade the planet in its image, finds itself living within the muteness of an image that no longer belongs to it. Mediation, having worked through nature in its primal objectivity, lapses back into immediacy.

***

It’s tempting to see – as in the last few sentences – these landscapes as templates for the worldview, so conveniently common in recent environmental theory, in which human and natural history, social agency and the processes of a catastrophically transformed nature, can no longer be distinguished. The environmental humanities have tended to draw from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument that climate change requires thinking beyond the historical, to the “species-history” of humanity’s place in deep time, the expedient conclusion that nothing, from the vain perspective of the span of human politics, really changes. Environmental “history” is a quilt of subtle inflections and shifts, of inhuman “agents” and “entangled effects”, of an essential continuity of geological and biological deep time that makes perspective reversible and interchangeable: to see the landscapes of the past as one with the seer of today, and to see the despoliation and polluted waters of today as just a variation on a past whose features bleed through.

Beyond the disciplinary objections art history would make to this view – which would blot out the hard-fought context and political freight clear in Poussin’s work of the period – it just doesn’t seem to capture the eerie ambience of the small landscapes. It would turn the muffled pain of these canvases into fatalism. Their anachronism preserves differentiation – the sense that they are stranded out of multiple, particular times – in the same movement by which they deny it. The category of “landscape” allows such a containment of tension. Landscape paintings register the traces of human history, but never as merely “human”, always couched in nature in its mere givenness. When nature has become unnatural, the landscape registers history as the echo, the parodic absence, of what could have averted the catastrophe. The essence of climate change, Andreas Malm argues, is that the past of industrialisation – which in Poussin’s 1640s has not yet arrived – determines the present: “the grip of yesteryear on today intensifies – or, put differently, the causal power of the past inexorably rises, all the way up to the point when it is indeed ‘too late’.” As the present becomes saturated with the past, the past is altered, becoming a mere product. The past contingencies that might have resulted in the survival of human species-being remain as blotted memories of Arcadia – and persist in the present as the possibility that it isn’t already “too late”: as Benjamin put it, “even the dead will not be safe”. These small, anomalous landscapes stand out as not as images of us, but of what lurks behind our supposed contemporaneity, as the fumes from the long-ago manufacture of bourgeois civilisation fill the present and its rate of profit, once our supposed birthright, inexorably falls.

***

Soon they’d be closing the parks. People had sat on blankets drinking those stub bottles of Red Stripe and estimating distances. The park across from his building was one of those left by 19th century philanthropic planning, the last inheritance, unabsorbed into the property market, of a moment that imagined every object would be brought into the light. The flagrant life of Le dejeuner sur l’herbe, its happy accommodation of bourgeois freedom and nature, became antique fashion to be revived in private, fatal reiteration become modular options, to be discarded and reworked with each season. He left the house to see if the commodities half-filling the shelves made him feel better. Throughout the previous months, mould clustered in the corners of his flat. To think of what he’d once called “lost futures” required conceiving of past and the time to come as articulated parts of a mechanism, rather than paint marks, what makes up ‘perspective’, readable along the structural lines of a picture surface. A 20th century romance. In the excess of flames from the last decade, sculpting itself again out of Minneapolis’ police precinct, poverty appeared as what was once the mirror of nature.