Blindness, Desire, and Touch in Two French Paintings - Listen -

Blindness, Desire, and Touch in Two French Paintings

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In a discussion at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris in 1667 on Nicolas Poussin's painting of Christ Healing the Blind (1650), the participants assumed that fidelity to the biblical text was part of the painter's brief, yet they could not account for several aspects of the painting or even agree on whether Poussin depicted the miracle at Capernaum (Matthew 9) or the one at Jericho (Matthew 20), a point still unresolved. Modern scholarship tends to view Poussin’s painting as thematizing seeing and (proper) looking, but this paper returns to the relationship of the painting to its textual source(s), viewing it as a "visual exegesis" of Scripture, and examines the range of possible readings of both Poussin's painting and a related, but remarkably different, painting by Philippe de Champaigne (ca. 1660). Particular attention is given to the desire and faith of the blind men and to Christ's potent gesture.

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