This weekend I look at two founding fathers of European landscape painting, both of them French expatriates in Italy. Today I trace the story of Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), who took three attempts to get to Rome, where he transferred from painting myths to idealised landscapes. Tomorrow I look at Claude Lorrain (1604/5–1682), who developed his distinctive style from imports from Northern Europe, also in Rome.

On Poussin’s first attempt to travel to Rome in 1617 or 1618, he got as far as Florence, where he suffered some sort of accident, and was forced to return home. On his second attempt in 1622, he only got as far as Lyon before turning back. When he finally arrived there in the Spring of 1624, it must have been with a great sense of relief.

The new Pope, Urban VIII, wanted Rome to remain Europe’s artistic capital, and the Academy of Saint Luke was led by another French artist, Simon Vouet, who provided Poussin with accommodation. Although Rome had a thriving art market at the time, Poussin needed patrons, particularly those with good connections, and must have been even more relieved when he was introduced to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, who happened to be the Pope’s brother. The next few years were troubled, though: the Cardinal was made papal legate to Spain, so left Rome, and Poussin fell ill with syphilis. It was only through the assistance of a chef that he was able to convalesce, and once he was well again in 1630, he married the chef’s daughter, which demonstrates how little was known about syphilis at the time.

Although it was Cardinal Barberini and his associates who paid Poussin’s bills, by far the most important of his patrons in Rome was the Cardinal’s secretary, Cassiano dal Pozzi (1588-1657), who was of noble birth, had been raised in Florence and educated at the University of Pisa. He was appointed secretary in 1623, and like his master was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, one of Europe’s earliest scientific societies.

Dal Pozzi was an obsessive collector. He was fascinated by natural history, antiquities, and curiosities of all kinds. He met and corresponded with Galileo, and, as much as his modest means allowed, was a patron of the arts. He bought paintings by Simon Vouet, Artemisia Gentileschi, Pietro da Cortona, even the renegade Caravaggio, but most of all Poussin’s.

Cassiano dal Pozzi lived with his younger brother Carlo and Carlo’s wife Teodora in a palace in the Via Chiavari, which steadily filled with their museum, to which they added other collections of scientific instruments, and a huge library. He employed young draughtsmen to make copies of Rome’s many antiquities, which he bound together in more than 23 volumes, in what was probably the first attempt to document the remains of the classical city.

Following dal Pozzi’s return from Spain in late 1626, he employed Poussin to make some drawings of antiquities, and to paint life-sized pictures of birds such as eagles and ostriches. Sadly, all those ornithological paintings by Poussin have vanished without trace. In return, Poussin was paid, and learned a great deal about Rome, natural history, and other subjects that fascinated his patron. In a fairly short time, the Cardinal’s secretary had assembled a collection of more than fifty of Poussin’s paintings, and it was he who encouraged Poussin to paint scenes from the the artist’s most enduring literary source, Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered.

With the support of dal Pozzi, Poussin became well-read and erudite, and composed each of his paintings with exceptional care and thought. One of his central concepts drew from modes in music, in which adoption of a tonal mode set the mood of the work.

In his early career, Poussin was an outstanding figurative painter who specialised in classical narrative, such as his famous Abduction of the Sabine Women (c 1634-35). It’s set against the historical background of the Capitoline Hill and the Tarpeian Rock, because of their importance in the narrative. As the bearded figure of Romulus stands overseeing the abduction, the hill and its precipitous cliffs dominate the distance.

In Landscape with a Man Scooping Water from a Stream (c 1637) Poussin has painted a landscape dominated by trees, most probably his lifelong favourite, oaks, in this case the Holm Oak, Quercus ilex. Each is carefully constructed from the trunk and branch anatomy, and their canopies, although dense, are clearly formed from leaves rather than solid masses. The distant view is that of an idealised Roman campagna, which was to reappear in his later works.

Landscape with Saint John on Patmos (1640) shows another idealised landscape, probably based on the western Italian coast rather than Patmos in the Dodecanese, in the eastern Aegean. Instead of placing trees at the edges, Poussin sets them further back; again these have the look of oaks. There is a richer variety in the middle distance, breaking the more regular lines of ancient ruins.

In Landscape with the Funeral of Phocion from 1648, the narrative figures in the foreground are small, and mixed with others who are part of its non-narrative background. Among that staffage are some who recur in his later landscapes: the shepherd with his flock, and the horseman. Deciding which are intended to be part of the narrative isn’t always obvious, and part of the fascination of Poussin’s paintings.

It was dal Pozzi who commissioned Poussin’s magnificent Stormy Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe (1651). Here the classical tragedy of the deaths of the lovers is being played out against one of Poussin’s most exciting landscapes. The lioness from that story has escaped into the middle ground and is attacking a horse, as everyone else is fleeing from the imminent thunderstorm. The mode is impending catastrophe.

Landscape with a Calm from about 1651 is one of his late pure landscape paintings, of a view that never existed except in the artist’s imagination, although there’s something familiar about each of the elements within it. Like an Advent calendar, it contains scattered scenes which the viewer is tempted to try to construct into a coherent narrative, but are probably just part of the painting’s mode.

In the foreground is a herdsman with his dog, tending to a small flock of goats grazing erratically at the borders of a track that meanders down to the lake. The only distinctive feature of the man, and indeed of this whole passage, is how non-descript he is. He has nothing that could be interpreted as an attribute, and gives no clue as to his identity. Just above his head is the distinctive arrowhead of broken water in the otherwise mirror-like surface of the lake, but there is nothing else of remark.

The most prominent feature of the painting is its large Italianate villa. In front of its outermost earthworks, two herdsmen tend a flock of sheep and cattle. The man on the left is playing bagpipes. There are figures scattered just outside and within the grounds of the villa, and two visible at its ground floor windows. There’s nothing that appears to be out of the ordinary here either.

The greatest human activity in the painting is at the left, where there are two horses with riders, and another horse visible within the outbuilding. One horse and its rider are just galloping off to the left; the other horse, its rider still mounted, is drinking from a trough under a portico at the end of the building. Above that horse’s hindquarters is an inscription that is illegible.

Among the background details there are bonfires. One burns vigorously with bright orange flames, and their smoke wafts erratically into the air, indicating the calm.

All the clues which the artist gives us point towards the mode of calm and peace in this landscape. Its one small burst of activity is a galloping horse. The air is so calm that the lake reflects like a mirror, and one tiny patch of broken water stands out.

It was Poussin who made the transition from painting mythological stories set in the countryside, to pure landscapes, albeit idealised composites assembled from quotations of reality.

Ovid assures us that the Fates didn’t completely crush the hopes of Troy in its destruction: from within the burning ruins, the hero Aeneas is fleeing, his aged father on his shoulders, and with his son Ascanius. For a Roman reader, Aeneas needs no introduction; like so many classical heroes, he’s the product of a union between a god and a mortal. His case is unusual, as it wasn’t Jupiter to blame, and Aeneas’ father was the mortal Anchises, now being carried on the shoulders of his son, and his mother was the goddess Venus.

Venus and Anchises, painted by William Blake Richmond between 1889-90, shows this legend. Jupiter challenged Cupid to shoot an arrow at his mother, causing her to fall in love with Anchises when she met him herding his sheep on Mount Ida. Aeneas was the result of that union, and the legend is the explanation for Venus watching over the safety of Aeneas during his prolonged journey from Troy.

There have been many fine paintings of Aeneas fleeing the sacked city with his family.

Unusually, one of Adam Elsheimer’s paintings of Aeneas Saving Anchises from Burning Troy was made in gouache. Of all these depictions, this seems to be the only one based on a reconstruction with models, as the method of carrying is not only feasible, but practical. Note how Aeneas is grasping a robe acting as his father’s seat, and Anchises has interlocked his fingers on his son’s forehead.

That doesn’t, though, appear to have been a study for Elsheimer’s finished work The Burning of Troy (c 1600-01) painted in oil on copper. The pair, with young Ascanius and his mother to the right, are seen in the left foreground. Elsheimer’s backdrop of the burning city includes the Trojan Horse, to the left of the upper centre, and hints with subtlety at the vast tragedy taking place.

Simon Vouet’s Aeneas and his Father Fleeing Troy from about 1635 shows the family group in close-up. From the left are Creusa, Aeneas’ wife who dies before she can leave the city, Aeneas, Anchises, and a very young Ascanius. This is the start of their flight, as Aeneas and Creusa are persuading Anchises to let Aeneas carry him to safety.

Pompeo Batoni’s Aeneas Fleeing from Troy (1753) shows the family as they leave the burning city behind them. Creusa is already falling slightly behind, and looks particularly distressed.

Oddly, Ovid doesn’t mention Creusa’s fate in the Metamorphoses, although a Roman reader would have been well aware of the detail in Virgil’s Aeneid, where she is left behind. By the time the hero reaches the city gates with his father and son, his wife is nowhere to be seen. Aeneas re-enters the burning city to look for her, but her ghost tells him that his destiny is to reach Hesperia, where he will become a king and marry a princess.

Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius then sail with a fleet of Trojan survivors to reach Delos, site of a temple to Apollo, whose priest and ruler of the island is Anius. He shows them the temple and city, and the two trees that the goddess Latona had held onto when she gave birth to the twin deities Apollo and Diana.

Johann Wilhelm Baur’s engraving of Aeneus Meets Anius (c 1639), for an illustrated edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, might appear generic, but is actually carefully composed. Aeneas stands upright, his spear almost vertical, in its centre. To the right his father Anchises embraces his old friend Anius, and to the left is the young Ascanius. In the right background is the city, with its imposing temple at the edge.

This singular painting is Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with Aeneas at Delos from 1672. This was the first of half a dozen works that Claude painted in the final decade of his life, based primarily on Virgil’s account in the Aeneid. Its meticulous details are supported by a coastal landscape of great beauty.

The twin trees at its centre, an olive and palm according to myth, are those that Latona held when she gave birth to Apollo and Diana, and now provide shade for a shepherd and his flock of sheep.

The king and priest Anius is at the left of the group, wearing priestly white, and pointing out the twin trees to his guests. To his right is Anchises in blue, then Aeneas holding his spear, and his young son Ascanius, with a suitably shorter spear in his right hand.

Claude’s fine details tell further stories too.

The relief at the top of the temple, immediately below a couple of casual onlookers, tells the story of Latona’s twins killing the giant Tityus, who had tried to rape their mother. Tityus is seen at the right of the relief, fallen down and wounded by the arrows of Diana (centre) and Apollo (left). Similarly to the Titan Prometheus, Tityus was sentenced to spend his time in the Underworld with two vultures feeding on his liver, which regenerated each night.

Anius then entertains his guests to a feast in their honour. Anchises asks what happened to Anius’ four daughters and one son. Anius replies that he is now almost childless, with his son far away on the island of Andros, and his daughters taken from him by Agamemnon. Bacchus had given his girls the remarkable gift that whatever they touched was transformed into food, wine, and oil. Because of that, the Greeks departing from their conquest of Troy abducted them to feed their army. When the daughters begged Bacchus to release them, the god turned them into white doves of Venus, Aeneas’s mother.

Anius and his guests continue to tell tales before retiring to sleep for the night. In the morning Aeneas goes to the oracle of Phoebus, who cryptically tells him to seek his ancient mother, and head for ancestral shores. They then exchange gifts, including a decorated krater (wine bowl) telling another story. The image on the krater shows the death of Orion’s daughters in Thebes. Their funeral procession took the bodies to the great square, for their cremation on pyres. From their ashes rose twins known as the Coroni.

After that, Aeneas and his companions sail on to Crete.