Pleasure’s Poise: Classicism and Baroque Allegory in Poussin’s ‘Dance to the Music of Time’

‘Like all artists of his period, Poussin placed great weight on the clarity and legibility of an allegory.’1 Thus the verdict of Otto Grautoff, in his 1914 monograph on Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), describing speci!cally the artist’s portrayal of earthly transience and vanity, ‘The Dance of Human Life’. Clarity was already a catchphrase in Poussin scholarship in Grautoff’s day, used most often in response to the artist’s technical precision and eye for compositional balance, as if his paintings’ classical symmetry and limpid light indicated a correspondingly lucid meaning. Classical transparency and rationality as an antidote to Baroque convolution and obscurity – this neat formulation breaks down before an intricate allegorical invention like ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’, as ‘The Dance of Human Life’ is now known (Fig. 1).2 Confusion, not clarity, best characterizes the litany of responses to this picture over the last three and a half centuries, and there are no letters or recorded dialogues that shed light on the artist’s intentions or programme. But this confusion is not primarily due to a lack of such sources, or to a growing distance from the time of the picture’s creation. It was there from the very beginning, for central to the painting’s conception is the mystery of life’s liminal stages, in all their persistent changeableness. The work’s resonance derives, and derived, from its resistance to legibility – from the complex circuit of meaning it stages for the viewer. Poussin’s allegory, I will argue, is riddled with paradox and ambiguity, hinging on the provocative and elusive !gure of earthly Pleasure. ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’ was commissioned in Rome by the learned Catholic prelate Giulio Rospigliosi (1600–69), the future Pope Clement IX (1667–69).3 Its date has been debated, but scholars most often opt for the mid-late 1630s, before Poussin’s brief interlude in Paris (1640–42).4 Four !gures personifying different phases in the drama of human fortune – Poverty, Labour, Wealth, and Pleasure – dance in a circle to the music of Father Time’s lyre. The conceit seems to be a unique blending of two sources: the Wheel of Fortune, represented in medieval and Renaissance art with four or more people attached to its spokes, all subject to the rise-and-fall of the