Nicolas Poussin's Landscape Allegories offers new interpretations for several of the most beautiful and enigmatic paintings of the artist's late career. Sheila McTighe examines the landscapes within the social and intellectual context of seventeenth-century libertinage, a clandestine atheist movement, and argues that, despite their outward limpidity, Poussin's landscape allegories are deliberately obfuscatory, their meaning ensconced in a set of signs and symbols recognizable only to an intellectual milieu that was marginal in seventeenth-century cultural life.

Table of Contents

1. Poussin's storm landscapes and Libertinage in the mid-seventeenth century; 2. Poussin's Landscape with Orpheus circa 1650: the politics of its reception; 3. Landscape as the site of allegory: Poussin and Roman studies of the hieroglyph; 4. Poussin's classicism or Libertinage in representation; Notes; Bibliography; Index.