National Gallery, London
Bacchus and his cavorting retinue of centaurs, satyrs and naked nymphs are in constant motion and yet spellbindingly still in the precision-engineered art of Nicolas Poussin
The scene: a chain of dancers in a glade, Roman tunics fluttering beneath a sky torn between sunlight and fierce darkness. A man leaps, two women twirl, a third opens her arms in elegant arabesque. There is ballet, and there is raucous Scottish reeling. It is almost impossible to see whose hand links to whose, or to whom each of the magnificently painted feet belongs – rising, falling, tiptoeing, pointing, landing hard back on ancient earth.
You follow the hands like signs, from one figure to the next. You count the feet through their rhythmic tattoo. The picture choreographs the eye, burling it round and around and eventually sideways to the crowd of Israelites on the right, faithlessly worshipping a solid gold calf. Except that Poussin paints a full-scale bull, raising a menacing hoof on the plinth. Even the statue takes part in his violent dance.