In the last phase of his career, parallel to the portraits of ladies of the first rank, Ingres dedicates himself - finally realizing some of his ideas from the first phase - to the act. That there was a clear connection between them was shown by the painter's juxtaposition itself, i.e. the interrelationship that existed even at the level of mere presentation: in the small, private exhibitions he organized for a privileged audience and clientele, Ingres Betty Rothschild (1848) exhibited next to Venus Anadyomene (1848), and sitting Madame Moitessier (1856) with La Source (Source.
A subject who exposes is always the subject that is exposed: presenting them side by side, in a proximity that could have seemed somewhat uncomfortable, even embarrassing, Ingres compares exemplary ladies from high society with naked girls, almost teenagers. In such a correlation, who exposes whom, are the social portrait and the (mythological) act symbolically congruent, does one type of image speak out what was kept silent, or is respectability transferred to a still problematic topic? Ingres's writing skilfully and self-servingly oscillates between extreme chastity that is able to slyly deny obvious sexuality and extreme obscenity that is so tempting that it easily lends itself to perversity.
Venus Anadyomene is based on ideas and sketches that Ingres made back in 1807-8, but it will be 40 years before the then visual inventory that the painter carefully prepared - fetishization is already a kind of fragmentation, metonymic distribution of the imaginary whole - will be finally connected , before the 'scattered' elements, which have probably been kept in the archive for too long, but perhaps, on the contrary, in exactly the right proportion, will be adequately 'stitched'. And that seam is always artificial: the picture is assembled and constructed, it is organized through the principles of harmony and rhythm.
So the display of origin the goddess, in the meta perspective, turns into a representation formation of the work itself: hence Venus no longer needs to testify to her own modesty by her position, by refusing to look at herself in the mirror that is offered to her, but reveals herself in the full splendor of beauty and grace for the viewer, if he is ready to receive the gift in the form of pearls that it will not fall in vain from the beautiful chestnut hair. In the classic setting, Venus covered with her hand - thus implicitly signaling - her own sex and breasts, but in Ingres's version there is no need for this kind of false melodrama, because the female figure is, more precisely, a female form, which is especially emphasized by the bow made by the right the hand, equated with the art form itself, in the abstract overlapping of the two separated areas of the textual inscription.
In contrast, the lower layer of the picture is the space where, in fact, sexual corruption takes place, where Venus' companions, the four Cupids, each in their own way, embody the repressed erotic energy without which there is no sublimation: the mirror as a narcissistic threat to autoeroticism, the worship of the feet which, of course, is , for Ingres the wrong kind of fetishistic ecstasy, the wild libidinal power of the bloodshot-eyed dolphin he rides cherub with exposed genitalia and a bow from which a phallic arrow has already been fired in the direction of what may, in fact, be the scene of the abduction of Europe.
How Venus Anadyomene but with the painter's annotation 1808. - 1848. clearly indicates that, in the last part of his career, Ingres was constantly directed towards his own past (blueprints, sketches, ideas, ideas), towards a kind of regression, towards revising and revaluation of his heritage, towards re-actualizing what had already been created, but perhaps requires a new redescription, then La Source and it is that ceremonial visit source from where everything originated, from where everything originated.
The author looks back to complete his own path, to elevate his own methodology to an abstract catharsis. Erotic and artistic desire thus become indistinguishable, two equally 'legitimate' variations of the same constellation that was established when the figure of a woman became the obsessive center of the author's script, that is, configuration. This return of Ingres, however, is strictly formalistic: the newly proclaimed Master is not someone who communicates wisdom about the (contemporary) world, who seeks to share experience, but an author who wants to bring the tendency to the end, to the climax, in order to offer his own work a systematization that does not can guarantee no semantic content, but only the consistent predominance of the signifier in the letter, which receives additional rigor and an additional, salutary dose enjoymenta.
Because, only when the system is closed, the pleasure can be prolonged, through constant replenishment and dynamization: enjoyment as a consequence of the construction and structure, the chain of signification, and almost no impulse from 'reality' is needed in order to be functional. Just as very often Ingres' light only serves to 'whiten' bodies and objects, that is, to strategically erase potential traces of individuality and imperfection in order to achieve a design that is as radical as it tries to aggressively approach Platonic idealism, so too La Source - in the persistent author's (pre)tension - it becomes a kind of white letter, a text that almost has no margins anymore, and therefore no more marginal. La Source is an image that can absolutely work without an implied non-diegetic space: the self-sufficiency of desire, the self-sufficiency of pleasure, the self-sufficiency of form, the self-sufficiency of the Ingres sign.
That the movement of the signifier in La Source strictly internal, it is evident from the fact that the referential stimulus without remainder rests on Venus Anadyomene: Ingres is repeated. But if she is already alone Venus Anadyomene was it a kind of repetition, a new contextualization of widely used material, which is why Ingres has - and again - the need or desire to make a 'duplicate' once more? Of course, the desire absolutely requires that it be multiplied, but here it is also about further 'cleaning' the image of 'unnecessary' details, about rejecting specificity in order to reach universality, which is always already abstract.
Venus Anadyomene is still, regardless of all Ingres' subtraction procedures, a classic painting, because its mythological iconographic content and its associated associative repertoire offer a stable hermeneutic basis for determining meaning. In other words, Venus Anadyomene is still a historical picture whose narrative potential has not been reduced. But, with La Source Ingres manages to almost completely reject the narrative dimension - there is not a single precise rapper who would draw the represented figure into a recognizable interpretive network - which practically erases the mentioned margins, so that the text has no room to 'expand': it can be turned - in the last possible duplication - exclusively to himself.
Since La Source it doesn't support (to the end) any story, it doesn't correspond to any specific time period, this entails that the signifier completely loses its external referentiality, but in return voluptuously strengthens the internal one, the power of reflection within the author's horizon. The work of art becomes closed to the world in order to reinforce the symbolic order.
Although he was already criticized earlier for such tendencies, Ingres does not hesitate to draw the ultimate conclusion, he realizes an important tendency in his work, to sign on the magisterial line: La Source is a larpurartist epiphany. For Ingres, aestheticism (compositionally, philosophically, aesthetically) is nothing but another, very powerful, version of idealization for which the author was constantly searching.
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