Abstract
With its evocation of the grave and death threatening love and happiness, Paul-Jean Toulet's poem " En Arles " could provide a fairly good commentary on Nicolas Poussin's Shepherds of Arcadia. As for the fanciful couplet quoted in the previous session, it suggests desacralizing the painting with burlesque. This would be the first way to misinterpret the painting : by desacralizing it.
The second way of misinterpreting the painting is quite the opposite : it operates through excessive sacralization, making the painting the key to a supreme mystery and placing it at the service of an external message. " Un trésor est caché dedans ", says La Fontaine's ploughman to his children, referring to the land he is giving them as an inheritance. The good reader works the text and makes it work, turning it inside out to find the treasure it conceals. However, " d'argent, point de caché " : the mistake would be to look for a treasure outside the work.
Gérard de Sède's works, later compiled and developed by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, are desperate to decipher in Poussin's painting the enigma of the Grail and the Templar treasure. These delirious readings are based on distorted historical data and esoteric discourses mixing neopaganism, medievalism, orientalism, Celticism and theosophy, where the influence of René Guénon is noticeable, and which have largely irrigated the fantastic literature and comics of the 20th century. In these discourses, India and Tibet in particular often appear as new spiritual Arcadia. As far back as Voltaire, in The Princess of Babylon, fancifully imagined a fabulous Indian Arcadia populated by eternally happy shepherds.
Extravagant interpretations of Poussin's work say nothing about the painting itself and its intrinsic power. The right reading must not make the painting disappear in favor of an external meaning. Rather, its mission is to make an already apparent meaning even more visible and precise. It's not a question of going beyond appearances, of playing with rebus, charades or anagrams, but of working on appearances themselves to make them even more meaningful.
