De la reseña de Anita Brookner para “The spectator”:

“Early in January 2000 the art historian T. J. Clark arrived in Los Angeles for a six-month stint at the Getty Research Institute. He was fortunate to see, in the Getty Museum, two great pictures by Poussin, the Getty’s ‘Landscape with a Calm’ and the National Gallery’s ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’, on loan from London. Over a period of weeks Clark visited the pictures almost every day and was able to register the tiny but memorable changes brought about not only by the process of intense contemplation but the traces left in memory and dream fragments which could only be clarified by more looking.”

“What this investigation demonstrates is that anything can be broken down but not necessarily put together again. It also demonstrates that Poussin, so often lazily categorised as a ‘peintre-philosophe’, is also a pure maker (look, for example, at the painting of the male figure’s mouth). What it proves — and this is entirely acceptable — is that the best antidote to reading is looking. I paid a further visit to ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’. I did not see one half of what Clark saw. I was conscious that the paint had sunk and the varnish darkened. But I also noticed, with pure pleasure, something about Poussin’s language, or marks, that I had not remarked before. This may have been nothing more than Clark’s influence, but it was proof, if proof were needed, of the validity of this sort of exercise. Forget blockbuster exhibitions: this is the way to see pictures.”