Gazing coolly and a little skeptically from a celebrated self-portrait, the painter himself greets us as we enter “Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[1]The image, in the collection of the Louvre, is a paradigm of French seventeenth-century painting at its most high-minded and disciplined, all subdued, richly orchestrated non-colors and lucid geometry. Wrapped in an elegant black-gray cloak and framed by stacked canvases, the artist turns to stare at us, as he grasps a portfolio. An inscription on a canvas reads, in Latin, “the effigy of Nicolas Poussin, painter of Les Andelys, at the age of 56, in the Jubilee year of 1650.” Behind the artist, on a picture almost obscured by the canvases piled against it, we glimpse the idealized profile of an allegorical figure of Painting—identified by the all-seeing eye on her diadem—embraced by two disembodied arms signifying “Friendship.” Above this fragment of intellectualized illusionism—a representation of a representation of a symbol—is its antithesis: a rectangle of bare wall, a pure plane of warm, palpitating gray. Dead center against all of this is Poussin’s head, bushy dark hair and a neat moustache punctuating a grave, sensible, notably unidealized face, with a generous nose and firm chin. He stares at us with dark, appraising eyes—eyes that form the intellectual and literal focal points of the picture, lined up almost perfectly with the long horizontals of the frames behind the artist’s head. Sight, we are reminded by this subtle emphasis, is the