Nicolas Poussin

Poussin is counted the painter of order: in the finished paintings every figure sits in its place, every gesture is a sentence. In the drawings another hand is at work — quick, unsettled, blotted. The pen strikes the paper; the brush drops the ink in one blow; the wash turns faces into holes. For issue zero we chose the drawings alone: the drunken bodies of the Bacchanal, the barbarians on Trajan's Column, the woman carried off by the sorcerer Atlante, the fallen trees, the bed of the last anointing. Under the classical there runs a wild line; Zıvana wants to show it. The images come from the open-access programmes of three museums; each plate carries its credit line and link.