Ingres fancied himself a history painter, although his narrative pictures are weakened by his inability to project a dramatic situation. A work that embodies his ideal programme of Neo-classicism is the huge Apotheosis of Homer, painted in 1827 and intended for the ceiling of a room of the Louvre. Ingres made no concessions to the principles of illusionistic ceiling perspective from below. He preferred the High Renaissance tradition, as exemplified by Michelangelo. Before an Ionic temple dedicated to Homer, the blind poet is enthroned, crowned with laurel by the muse of epic poetry. Below him sit two women figures, the one with a sword, representing the Iliad, another with a rudder the Odyssey. The geniuses from antiquity and later times whom Ingres considered truly Classical are grouped around. At the lower right are grouped three French Classical writers. Shakespeare and Corneille make the scene in the lower left-hand corner. The cool light of an ideal realm binds the figures together in the kind of artificial composition that became definitive for muralists even into the twentieth century.
Ingres was financially obliged to accept portrait commissions, which he considered a waste of time, although today his portraits are accepted as his greatest works. He even drew portraits of visitors to Rome, who trooped to his studio. Such pencil studies as the Stamaty Family of 1818, show the exquisite quality of his line.
Ingres's paintings are perfect in colour. All the beauty of his colour and the perfection of his form are seen in the portrait of Comtesse d'Houssonville, painted in 1845. She is posed in a corner of her salon, in an attitude clearly derived from Classical art. No Dutch painter ever produced still lifes more convincing than the vases on the mantle. The reflection in the mirror, going back through Velazquez to van Eyck, reappears again and again in the nineteenth-century art, deeply concerned as it was with the optical phenomena.
Although many of his subjects are drawn from the medieval history and poetry, dear to the Romanticists, Ingres was resolutely opposed to their abandonment to emotion and to the artistic sources on which they drew. Yet, the influence of Ingres later in the nineteenth century was very great.
Make sure you know how to pronounce the foallowing words:
Dominique Ingres; Athens; Salon; Delacroix; Velazquez; Odyssey; Iliad; Eyck; genius; Romanticists; Louvre; exquisite; Shakespeare; Corneille; Renaissance; prodigy; apotheosis; Gothic; laurel; Chinese; phenomena; violin; perspective