Abstract
Poussin's painting Les Bergers d'Arcadie does not require us to choose between contradictory interpretations: they are all valid in the same way as optical illusions whose interpretation and referent change depending on whether we structure the image around one line or another. The alternation between Christian, Stoic and Epicurean interpretations of Poussin's work reflects a similar instability. Reflecting on optical illusions, Wittgenstein distinguishes between seeing something and seeing as something: we see only one thing, but that one thing can be seen as several things in succession. A text remains the same as an object, but we can attribute different meanings to it depending on the angle from which we look at it. It would be a mistake, even a mistake, to decide on an exclusive meaning when we know that multiple interpretations are possible. We mustn't confuse fact with meaning. To interpret is not to see, but to see-as, which means accepting the multiplicity of possible aspects in a literary text or a work of art, even when these aspects are contradictory.
The undecidability of the message in Poussin's painting is an integral part of his artistic project. It corresponds to an entire humanist movement of the 16th and 17th centuries, to which Erasmus and Montaigne belonged and which attempted to reconcile Christianity, Stoicism and Epicureanism. Nothing in Poussin's biography suggests that he was part of the religious orthodoxy of the time. On the contrary, everything leads us to believe that he was sensitive to what we call "erudite libertinism", while knowing how to drown his opinions in the informational noise produced by his works.
With Les Bergers d'Arcadie, the viewer is plunged into the same reading action as the characters in the painting, in a mise en abyme comparable to Velasquez' s Les Ménines. It's an allegory of reading, representing three complementary stages: deciphering the signs (flush with the text), understanding the meaning (centripetal moment, finger stretched towards the text and the author), meditating on the meaning (centrifugal moment). Meaning is what the text and its author want to tell us in their context; this act of understanding strives to overcome the cracks of time and death. Meaning, or meanings, is what the text says to us, in our context.
A Warburg-likePathosformel (emotional formula) links the shepherd on the right, Ingres' Oedipus and Bartholdi's Champollion: the foot resting on a rock, the elbow resting on the leg, the index finger outstretched, such is the figure of the hermeneuticist. Poussin's painting urges us to become shepherds of texts and meanings: first, we must humbly decipher, then extract meaning with the help of memory, and finally make meaning flourish in multiplicity, while knowing how to bring extravagant meanings back into the fold. These are the rules of reading that we have tried to apply to the painting itself: humility, benevolence, rigor and freedom, with room for the undecidable and polysemy.
