smARThistory.us

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (pronounced: aah-n Gr-ah) was David’s most famous student. And while this prolific and successful artist was indebted to his teacher, Ingres quickly turned away from him. For his inspiration, Ingres, like David in his youth, rejected the accepted formulas of his day and sought instead to learn directly from the ancient Greek as well as the Italian Renaissance interpretation of this antique ideal. In 1827, Ingres exhibited Apotheosis of Homer in the annual Salon. His grandest expression of the classical ideal, this nearly seventeen foot long canvas reworks Raphael’s Vatican fresco, The School of Athens, 1509-11, and thus pays tribute to the genius Ingres most admired. As Raphael had done four hundred years earlier, Ingres brought together a pantheon of luminaries. Like secular sacra-conversaziones, the Raphael and the Ingres bring together figures that lived in different eras and places. But while Raphael celebrated the Roman Church’s High Renaissance embrace of Greek intellectuals (philosophers, scientists, etc.), Ingres also includes artists (visual and literary).

Set on a pedestal at the center of the Apotheosis of Homer, the archaic Greek poet is conceived of as the wellspring from which the later Western artistic tradition flows. The entire composition functions somewhat like a family tree. Homer is framed by both historical and allegorical figures and an Ionic temple that enforces the classical ideals of rational measure and balance. Nike, the winged Greek goddess of the running shoe (ahem, of victory) crowns Homer with a wreath of laurel, while below him sit personifications of his two epic poems, The Odyssey (in green and holding an oar) and The Illiad (in red and seated beside her sword). Note the following figures (please consider their implied importance according to their placement relative to Homer:

Dante (stands beside Homer at his left wearing a blue hood and laurel wreath)
Phidias (the greatest of ancient sculptors is standing to the right of Homer, in red, holding a mallet)
Raphael (third from the left edge, top row, in profile and wearing Renaissance garb)
Ingres-he’s put himself in rather good company don’t you think? (his is the young face looking out at us beside Raphael)
Poussin (he points us toward Homer from the lower left of the canvas)
Michelangelo (the bearded figure at lower right)

It would be easy to characterize Ingres as a consistent defender of the Neo-Classical style from his time in David’s studio into the middle of the 19th century. Remember that the Apotheosis of Homer dates to 1827. But the truth is more interesting than that. Ingres actually returned to Neo-Classicism after having rejected the lessons of his teacher, David, and after having laid the foundation for the emotive expressiveness of Romanticism, the new style of Gericault and the young Delacroix that Ingres would eventually defend against. Ingres’ early Romantic tendencies can be seen most famously in his painting, Grande Odalisque, 1814.
Here a languid nude is set in a sumptuous interior. At first glance this nude seems to follow in the tradition of the Great Venetian masters, see for instance, Titian’s the Venus of Urbino, 1538 (see image in textbook). But upon closer examination, it becomes clear that this is no classical setting. Instead, Ingres has created a cool aloof eroticism accentuated by its exotic context. The Peacock fan, the turban, the enormous pearls, the hookah (a pipe for hashish or perhaps opium), and of course, the title of the painting all refer us to the French conception of the Orient. Careful, the word “Orient” does not refer here to the Far East so much as the Near East or even North Africa. In the mind of an early 19th century French male viewer, the sort of person for whom this image was made, the odalisque would have conjured up not just a harem slave, itself a misconception, but a set of fears and desires linked to the long history of aggression between Christian Europe and Islamic Asia. Indeed, Ingres’ porcelain sexuality is made acceptable even to an increasingly prudish French culture because of the subject’s distance. Where, for instance, the Renaissance painter Titan had veiled his eroticism in myth, Ingres covered his object of desire in a misty exoticism. Some art historians have suggested that colonial politics also played a role. France was at this time expanding its African and Near Eastern possessions, often brutally. Might the myth of the barbarian have served the French who could then claim a moral imperative? By the way, has anyone noticed anything “wrong” with the figure’s anatomy?