Nicolas Poussin's Landscape Allegories offers new interpretations for several of the most beautiful and enigmatic paintings of the artist's late career. Sheila McTighe examines the landscapes
within the social and intellectual context of seventeenth-century libertinage, a clandestine atheist movement, and argues that, despite their outward limpidity, Poussin's landscape allegories
are deliberately obfuscatory, their meaning ensconced in a set of signs and symbols recognizable only to an intellectual milieu that was marginal in seventeenth-century cultural life.
