Hardly anyone dares use the term “High Art” these days—not without high irony—but it’s difficult to know how else to categorize works that present elevated and learned themes with great formal rigor and scrupulous evocation of the antique. Think of the stately rhythms of Corneille’s verse dramas, the astringent harmonies of Charpentier’s operas, and the recondite plots, drawn from mythology, of both; then think of the sober, passionate canvases of their near-contemporary, Nicolas Poussin (1594– 1665), and you know exactly what I mean: arcadian landscapes and scenes of ancient cities, where idealized men and women, gods and heroes, patriarchs and saints, solemnly enact remote dramas, like stage performers frozen in noble, expressive attitudes—pictures whose authority and sureness, no less than their subject matter or manner, make only the problematic phrase “High Art” seem appropriate.

Other words that such pictures call up—order, discipline, accuracy, amplitude, clarity, severity, ambition, certitude—are no less problematic these days, which may help to explain why modern audiences, reared on anxiety and uncertainty, and more comfortable with the incomplete and the ambiguous than with the indisputable, find it hard to come to terms with Poussin, however much they recognize his historical importance. The recent exhibition mounted in Paris to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of his birth—the first Poussin retrospective since 1960—left no doubt about his pre-eminence as a painter in the grand manner, but I’m not certain that it diminished his difficulty. No one could emerge from the show unconvinced that Poussin belongs among