Nicolas Poussin earned a reputation for himself as a painter of dance themes in the 1620s and 1630s, charting a new stylistic route that would make him the model for three centuries of artists in the French classical tradition. The first publication entirely to Poussin's dancing pictures, Poussin and the Dance, places the artist in seventeenth-century Rome, a city rich in the antique sculptures and Renaissance paintings that inspired these vivacious pieces.
The collection examines how these works helped their maker address the difficulty of arresting motion, explore the expressive power of the body, and invent new ways of composition by tracing the motif of dancing through his early Roman production. The studies look at how Poussin applied dancing principles to every element of his work, particularly his use of wax miniatures to choreograph the compositions he drew and painted.
Richly illustrated and engagingly written, this collection analyzes Poussin's early investigation of dancing themes, his related drawings and the ancient reliefs of dancers that he studied within a broader context of seventeenth-century European culture, collecting and patronage. The father of French classicism is put in a new light via the lens of dance.