Uma Dança ao Som do Tempo

Poussin painted this in Rome in the mid 1630s, and it wasn't his own idea. The subject was dictated to him in detail by the man who commissioned it, Giulio Rospigliosi, a cultivated churchman who would later become Pope Clement IX. The four figures joined hands in a ring are not just dancers. They stand for Poverty, Labour, Riches, and Pleasure, and the dance turns in a circle because that's the point, one state leading to the next and back again, the whole wheel of a human life. Off to the side an old winged man plays a lyre, and he is Time, setting the tempo they all move to. Overhead the sun god drives his chariot across the sky, so the small ring of dancers is caught inside the larger turning of the day and the year. The picture came to London in the 19th century and is now in the Wallace Collection, its title borrowed later by the novelist Anthony Powell for his twelve-volume sequence.