The number of Poussin's paintings explicitly depicting the theme of the dance is small: A Dance to the Music of Time, A Bacchanalian Revel before a Term, Hymenaeus Disguised as a Woman During an Offering to Priapus, and, arguably, his lost Bacchanal before a Temple, for which drawings and copies survive. If to these are added paintings by the artist with other subjects that include one or more dancers, such as The Adoration of the Golden Calf, the list becomes substantially longer. And if his paintings lacking dance subjects or dancers but showing figures with dance-like movements are considered (a subjective approach nevertheless embraced by the authors), such as the artist's two versions of The Abduction of the Sabine Women, the number of works can increase to a significant fraction of his artistic production.
The book under review and its accompanying exhibition explore the artist's paintings depicting dance themes or including dancers or figures in dance-like poses, his related drawings, and antique works representing dancers that he studied. The authors set out to show how his paintings, in addition to their famous erudition and classicism, are full of delight and revelry (and, it must be added, an eroticism that some viewers find either problematic or insightful). The book focuses on the period when he made his dance pictures, before his trip to Paris in 1640. Depicting dancers helped Poussin “to work through the problem of arresting motion, to explore the expressive potential of the body, and to devise new methods of composing” (1). These concerns informed his paintings, drawings, and the arrangements of wax figurines he made to choreograph his scenes.
In the first of the book's five essays, co-curator Emily A. Beeny observes that Poussin approached dramatic action with a choreographer's eye. She ties dance to the artist's study of the antique in collaboration with his first important patron, Cassiano dal Pozzo. Beeny traces how Poussin's deepening knowledge of ancient art and literature enabled him to imbue his dance subjects with poetry and imagination.
Poussin's impulses to emulate in paint the qualities he prized in antique sculpture—volume, proportion, physicality, and weight—are highlighted by co-curator Francesca Whitlum-Cooper in the second essay. She argues that the study of antique objects guided Poussin's themes, forms, and compositions as he sought to make painting more sculptural, moving from his coloristic first manner, influenced by Titian, to his solid, structural, mature style.
Whitlum-Cooper considers the bacchanals Poussin painted for Cardinal Richelieu's château in the third essay. Her analysis of drawings and X-ray fluorescence scans for The Triumph of Pan leads her to conclude that the central sculptural herm may be Priapus and not Pan. She is not the first to make this proposal, but her technical approach is new. Noteworthy is her judgment, based on analysis of IRR and XRF scans, pigments, and canvas, that The Triumph of Silenus is an original work by Poussin, and not a copy, as has been long supposed. She closes her essay by breaking boldly with the accepted scholarly presumption, traceable to Bellori and Félibien, that the enigmatic Triumph of Neptune and Amphitrite (also known as The Birth of Venus) was owned by Richelieu. She concludes that this claim must be rejected without convincing archival evidence.
The centerpiece of the fourth essay is Beeny's intriguing argument that the striking difference in style between Poussin's two versions of The Abduction of the Sabine Women, probably painted within a couple of years of each other, may be accounted for through patronage. The grittier Louvre version was painted for future cardinal Luigi Omodei, who would have responded positively to the picture's image of pagan Roman criminality, whereas the Metropolitan Museum version, with its geometric order, was made for French general and courtier Maréchal Charles I de Créquy, who would have admired Roman civilization.
Contributor Jonathan Unglaub's final essay focuses on the origins of Poussin's theory of modes. Bellori reports that Giulio Rospigliosi, later Pope Clement IX, was patron for A Dance to the Music of Time and invented its conceit. An important literary theorist in Rospigliosi's circle, Giovanni Battista Doni, stressed the ancient Greek musical modes’ affective and allegorical associations by linking emotional feeling in music with the expressiveness of dramatic texts and poetry. With Gioseffo Zarlino, he facilitated Poussin's correlating the modes with expression in painting. Building on this previous scholarship, Unglaub describes Doni's allegorical personifications in poetry, particularly Ricchezza, Povertà, Felicità, and Servitù. These correspond to the protagonists in Poussin's picture. Based on this evidence, Unglaub pairs a musical mode with each of the four main figures in the painting. These modes, he argues, served as the wellspring for the artist's theory.
The authors/curators have staged a welcome exhibition of Poussin's paintings, drawings, and antique visual sources, some of which are rarely seen by the public.
