Abstract
It is by a happy combination of accident and design that the narrator of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time and his favourite painter bear the same Christian name. For Nicholas Jenkins and Nicolas Poussin share a preference for large canvases, intricate designs, and a classical coolness of expression. Also, in the work of both writer and painter mythological themes are present — for Poussin, in a direct representation of classical and Christian myth; for Jenkins, in Greek and Roman mythological parallels to the contemporary scene, usually made explicit, sometimes suggested by prolonged description of a painting of a subject taken from Ovid or the Greek mythographers. On the surface, the intentions of the two artists could hardly be more different. Poussin’s motives were didactic and antiquarian, Jenkins’s mock heroic. Yet the rich luxuriance of Powell’s descriptions — of Poussin’s ‘Dance’ itself for example, or of Tiepolo’s (fictional) ‘Candaules and Gyges’ (in Temporary Kings, 4), seems to belie a merely mock heroic intention.
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© 1984 Patrick Swinden
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Swinden, P. (1984). Anthony Powell. In: The English Novel of History and Society, 1940–80. Studies in 20th Century Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17512-3_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17512-3_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-17514-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-17512-3
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