In his correspondence, in public appearances, articulating his own aesthetic postulates, in anecdotes recounted by his students, Ingres he constantly laments the portraits, that they separate him from his real pictures, that they take up too much of his time, that they introduce him to boring social interaction, that they burden him with obligations that he would prefer to ignore altogether. The persistence with which he repeated the above-mentioned views, especially towards the end of his career, indicates that this typical artistic whining actually only more or less slyly conceals the fact that, in fact, from the earliest days, Ingres found precisely in the portrait perhaps 'populist', but certainly active the fascination with which he opposed his own poster ideology of historical painting. But here it is necessary to clarify: not all portraits, but only female ones, precisely those that represented the greatest difficulty or even the greatest torment for Ingres, that most deviated him from the (theoretically) planned path, that is, those that formalized the painter's aloofness.
Madame de Senonnes (1814) was Ingres's first female portrait in which, as part of the scenography, as a generator of textual expansion, a mirror is present - throughout his career the painter will not include a specular image in any of his male portraits - in which the model is doubled and doubled, but in in which the author finds the infrastructure for his metapoetic, essayistic development. As many as 31 years will pass until the next painting in which Ingres will again include that privileged field for thematizing the disproportion between different levels of iconographic description, the discrepancy between the object and the reflection, what is painted and what is copied: Louise, Countess Othenin of Haussonville (1845)
Ako su maestralni radovi poput Mrs. Duvaucey (1807) and, in particular, Madame de Senonnes were indisputable proof that Ingres not only mastered the technology of portrait production with a beautiful idiosyncratic virtuosity, why was there a partial standstill, a shift of attention, even beyond noting the financial necessities that the artist experiences in the (free) market and his constant lamentations? In one period, Ingres literally survived thanks to portraits, including those intended for English tourists in Rome and Florence, which inevitably offered the painter a completely 'low-genre' perspective to view his own failure. After his second, triumphant return to Paris, Ingres was so highly established that accepting commissions for portraits no longer had to be a consequence of financial dependence. Although Ingres would never stop lamenting the format, Louise, Countess Othenin of Haussonville was a magnificent indicator of a new energy and stylization: the market economy could be completely replaced by a (libidinal) economy of desire which, like the bodies of his aristocratic female models, was deepened and prolonged, that is, manneristically extended.
As well as on Madame de Sonennes, business cards are also present in this picture, this time placed under the mirror, near the binoculars, which indicates that the woman has just gone to or has just returned from the opera. The social context is outlined, the social position of the model is sketched, but is it even important? Is Louise painted as a future author, an amateur painter, a beauty from high Parisian society?
Ingres' attention across and across the canvas is indiscriminate, each form subjected to detailed elaboration, each signifier passed through careful visual explication. The image comes to us as a decadently stylized sentence in which, however, there is no accent: in such an environment, there is no gradation in the sign system, no emphasis within the narrative line. In other words, Ingres is not interested here in presenting his model in a revealing light, in bringing us closer to the countess with a portrait, in humanizing her for her contemporaries, and for all other observers, potentially for herself as well.
Ingres is not a painter of the (psychological) interior: he is a painter of form. The deep blue eyes of the contessa are not a 'window into the soul' of a woman: they are just the result of an ideal meeting of line and color. Unlike Jacques Louis Davida who complained that he made a mistake in choosing the location of the studio, because the lack of light prevented him from adequately painting the pupils Juliette Recamier (1800), which will be only one of the reasons that this portrait will never be finished, such a thing could not have happened to Ingres, because he did not really need shading inside the frame: he is the author of the exposure.
In Ingres' paintings, there is always more light than a realistic view would require: an idiosyncratic illumination that, of course, is not there to break spells or reveal secrets, but to subject the entire canvas to a unified or unique visual regime. The look that the contessa returns to the viewer, a look that has a penetrating look, a look that is only further sharpened by the use of binoculars to see more clearly the plots on the stage of the opera, or the theater, or life, does not offer any kind of transparency, no matter how 'transparent' or seductive they may be. transparent her eyes. Beauty is first and foremost of a formalistic nature: an event that is not from somewhere else transferred, but primarily takes place on canvas.
For Ingres, a (female) portrait is not a social document, nor is it a testimony of a special, historical moment, a reproduction of a certain individuality. Of course, the portrait retains its resemblance to its model, but everything else is a (masterpiece)-work of the painter's intervention. It has already been stated: Ingres's manipulation of the projected reality, slippage and distraction are precisely the points through which the author's signature is shaped as a multi-sense signature that embodies desire and vision. If the fetishized model is already at a distance from the potential viewer, is it at the same distance from Ingres himself, when he already shows a certain (sexual, artisanal, aesthetic) interest in the object of his representation?
Ingres's portraits of women from the aristocracy are representations of objects that are inaccessible, that due to the nature of the social hierarchy must remain outside the painter's - as a person - domain or reach. However, the artistic process of portraiture was never conceived as a form of compensation. Already investments: from the initial libidinal intrigue (or plot, or enigma) to defining the poetic model (in both meanings of the word), from a concrete character to an extended imagination, from mimesis to abstraction, from a profile that is valid for one time to a form (i.e. an idea) that is valid for all times.
The link between these two phases is, of course, the fetish which - again - unites the before (desire intertwined with anxiety) and the after (desire that is sublimated, which is permanently dislocated in art), the down-to-earth (sexual initiation that cannot be acknowledge) and the sublime (desire that is purified and thus socially and aesthetically acceptable). In these dizzying deployments, the painter can always, in the end, fall in love with his own vision, which is only partially narcissistically caused.
There are two types of portrait painters: those who look more at the model and those who look more at their own canvas. Ingres is - next in that Raffaella, that is, his staging of Raffaello's resolution of that dilemma - by all accounts belonged to this second type. Louise, Countess Othenin d'Haussonville is a magnificent incarnation of Ingres's brilliant strategy of obsessive observation through autopoetic rigor.
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