In this highly original and innovative study of Nicolas Poussin, one of seventeenth-century Europe's greatest artists, Oskar Batschmann presents a series of connected studies that offer new ways of interpreting the work and ideas of this brilliant and complex figure. This superbly illustrated book is a polemical challenge in a field of art-historical research that has often lost its way in insoluble disputes and erudite details.

"Like Poussin's paintings, this is a highly polished work. In prose of great elegance, Batschmann achieves an almost perfect balance between exposition and polemic."--Times Literary Supplement

"This is a tough but rewarding book, focusing not so much on the context of Poussin's book - its extrinsic framework - but intently on the work itself, and the attitude of Poussin to his subject-matter, from history painting to the holy family, and what Batschmann calls 'tragic landscape'."--The Sunday Times