The most significant self-portrait of Ingres does not exist today except in the form of a copy, made by a woman's hand: Marie-Anne-Julie Forestier, Copy of Ingres' self-portrait from 1804. (1807). Male original, female copy: is it the kind of text that can be used for a deeper reading of the subject, or is the internal aporia impermanent? In any case, we come across a (self) portrait or (self) presentation of a young 24-year-old painter, black hair, of course, parted in the middle in a Raphaelian style, and determination in his eyes. Unlike Davida who took part in the real revolution, Ingres leaves the revolutionary tendencies only on the canvas, only for the canvas.
What is really radical in this space, what is radical? act, therefore, an act of stripping (procedure), exposing (method), exposing (intention)? The painter is in front of the canvas, but it is only an empty surface, a black geometric figure, a territory that is exclusively marked, but not filled. Ingres presents himself as an artist who has a special task, a completely different mission, a completely atypical starting point: a topos of origin, an original or primary staging, a point of originality. In the initial variant, the author stands against the tradition in which painters, with honor, with self-confidence, with narcissistic pretentiousness, with technical self-confidence, with a specular and speculative identity, depict themselves on canvas, sometimes with a critical or ironic detachment, but always with awareness about the craft and symbolic value of the reproductive art to which they belong.
Because what the painter holds in his left hand is a handkerchief with which he preserves the pristine untouchability of the canvas. While other painters draw and paint, Ingres - deletes. He removes everything that could 'taint' that sacred square or rectangle, first by remaking and correcting himself, preserving the absolute potency of the empty proscenium. And originality, anyway, is destined to be lost forever, under countless layers of text: could the fate of a painting in which the author ceremoniously uses a handkerchief - not the chalk that is ready, like a sharp knife, in the other hand - but also that alone be - deleted.
And the beginning of that erasure happened - adding, by including a character or motif, by the obligatory 'remaking' of an overly bold vision. After suffering criticism when Self-portrait was exhibited at the 1806 Salon, Ingres decides to, perhaps panicked, aggressively 'normalize' his own handwriting, that is, to invert the perspective and nature of his own incision into the space of the original void. Namely, under the pressure of 'rational' argumentation, the painter will docrtati something that was only one of the possibilities, moreover, only one of the more banal thematic solutions: on the menacingly empty canvas, Ingres will - 'afterthought' instead of 'authentic inspiration' - defame the purity of the framed surface by writing the most conventional appendix (and literally: appendix on a fascinating concept).
And so Ingres's self-portrait was unfortunately 'enriched' with the lines and contours of his friend's face Gilberta (on whose unfinished portrait to work sometime at that time) which are a violent, foreign element on the original or primal idea. What was subversive is now 'pacified', introduced into more realistic, 'meaningful' coordinates: the energy of the vacuum is channeled within a more acceptable mimetic agenda. Ingres will continue to intervene on this canvas until the final version: Self-portrait at 24 (revised around 1850) where the palimpsest was corrected so that the youthful face was retained, but with a changed context: compared to the original, the most important thing is what does not have, which is hidden even outside the margins.
Instead of a handkerchief that wipes the canvas or wipes something off the canvas, the left hand is 'decently' moved to his chest, as if the painter is paying respect to himself, while his jacket has conspiratorially disappeared, which introduced not only unusual, but almost unbearable imbalance in the original composition. Like the last version Oedipa and Sphinx (1864), where the hero's finger down and the monster's horrified face explicitly communicate the outcome of the narrative, as Self-portraits in 78 (1858) which brings the artist as an already canonized classic, and revised Self-portrait at 24 it tries to regulate and reconcile the primordial ambivalence.
In this way, in a perhaps not so paradoxical twist, the original was preserved only as a copy: a double that haunts all the author's sent and unsent letters. That copy was made, to make things even more interesting, by the unsuspecting wife of Ingres, a woman who will be - even with a dose of violent indiscretion and avoidance of good manners - very soon deleted from the painter's life narrative.
At Ingres' express request, Mademoiselle Marie-Anne-Julie Forestier, his fiancee who, apparently, was also a student in David's studio for a short time, makes a copy of the radical Self portrait and thus preserves it in its original form, as a ghostly reminder and a non-threatening rapper who will be a factor of anxiety and questioning. In a gesture that places the transfer of likeness and ownership in the ambience of the Oedipal melodramatic trajectory, the destination of this image - the intention of the male member, and the elaboration of the female member in a loving couple - is extremely symptomatic in a perverse circulation: in August 1807, to the address of the father, Jean-Marie-Josepha Login, will be handed a copy of the son made by his, it turns out, never realized wife.
The letter reached its destination, and soon after Ingres - who, after long lamenting the move, suddenly fell in love with Rome, the place where his undying love for the Old Masters, especially To Raffaello - decides to call off the engagement. Six years later, the already established painter falls in love with a certain Adèle de Laureal (first she was a real woman!). Since she is already married, she suggests to Ingres that he arranges a meeting with her cousin as compensation Madeleine who everyone says looks uncannily like her. The painter, in a stroke of fate, on unseen accepts the proposal. And so, Ingres left a specific woman who, in addition, was also a painter (later she even exhibited at the Salon), a person who had already appeared on his canvas, so that in return he would receive - imaginary woman which, in addition, was actually a Doppelgänger, a replacement for the original fascination, a double first wishes. They saw each other for the first time in August 1813 in front of Nero's tomb in Rome and would live for the next thirty-six years in a harmonious marriage. Obviously, Ingres' double Madeleine will be a much happier variant than the subsequent Madeleine from Hitchcock's Vertigo.
Let's return immediately from the biographical excursion - in which they could not be ignored symbolic connotations - to the preserved image second hand. In his first self-portrait, Ingres, right next to the easel, is the author of a revolutionary, radical negative dialectic. Erasure is an act of negation, sabotaging a projection that would have to possess certain mimetic predispositions. In this respect, Ingres' self-portrait offers a vacuum, not a content: a formalization of lack, an acknowledgment that Nothing stands at the center of the picture. For the formation and formatting of desire, this deficiency - which Ingres emphasizes almost with Hegelian consciousness - is constitutional: desire begins to circle around a central absence. Hence Self-portrait - similar like Valpinçon bathers - it works, through the accentuation of a fundamental absence that is dramatized by the author's suppression procedure under the surface of the canvas or text, as a prolegomena for the authentic manifestation of desire, in an inverted narcissistic vision.
But, in the crucial point, Self-portrait it is not just a picture of the deficit, which is anchored on the right side. Self-portrait is, at the same time, in a subtle juxtaposition, also a display of excess, poetic excess that will inevitably follow, representational abundance that will spill over the frame-margin. Opposite the reality of lack, stands the illusion of excess: opposite the unquestionable lack, stands the imagination of excess.
A self-portrait is always already a hypnotic state: the non-reality of the hallucination that encompasses the subject. Otherwise, the self-portrait is in itself a kind of trick for the eye that is invited to too much it reads into the being, into the text, into the being of the text. Self-awareness is, at least in part, a consequence of delusion. Because of the jacket that has just fallen off his shoulders (so this is the moment just before the revelation, before the fatal revelation, before the 'banal' truth will be established), at first, at first glance, in a cursory examination, it seems that the young Ingres, while fixing every viewer and every reader, also has - a third hand.
trompe l'oeil it is not related to the perspective, to the spatial-temporal complex, but to the artist's arsenal, repertoire and range: to the character of the spectacle as such, as a field in which pleasure is produced, on both sides of the proscenium. In the autopoetic projection, in the specular staging which is a double reflection of the subject, expressive capacities are necessarily increased. The flaccid sleeve - another empty space in the picture - may in the near future be filled with the blood of imagination and creation: although currently 'deactivated', the shape of the phallus is a formalistic precondition for the script that will be imposed, for the signature that will turn all subsequent images into the ultimate idiosyncratic a letter.
The pose of the artist - and not his character or psychological profile - is a symbolic infrastructure for the further branching of signs, and this means also for determining fate, narrative destination, for the formation of symptoms and pleasures, for marking the work with tragic pathos and penetration of pleasure: as Oedipus - in brilliant Hölderlinov verse - he has one eye (too) more, so Ingres also has one arm (too) more, before his Odalisque will even get three vertebrae (too) more.
But there is another powerful parallelism at Self portrait, another point of mirroring, a 'comparison' that refers to the expressive and linguistic capacity of the signifier as a signifier, a new doubling, defining the nature of the painter's excess. That is, in this image as well - the place and time (equally illusory) of the birth of the fetish - the semantic seams will be tied with a phallic signifier. While the sleeve hangs down, in the same territorial section on the other side, from the right hand that holds the chalk as a penetrating revolutionary cold the weapon, however, falls to the bottom of the virgin canvas anatomically quite accurate, indecently convincing, utterly obscene - a phallic, erect shadow. Promise enjoymenta, the promise of fear, the promise of suspense.
Self-portrait, therefore, is the picture in which Ingres determined the coordinates of his own letter, but also established the inherent dynamics of desire and anxiety that will form the painter's mise-en-scène. An anonymous critic who saw Self-portrait at the 1806 Salon, he conveyed his dismay before this marvelous and monstrous picture: 'In one hand the painter holds a handkerchief which he places, for no apparent reason, on a canvas which is still empty, but certainly destined to present the most horrible subjects, judging by the dark and the wild look on his face'.
And indeed, horrible themes and idealized beauty will predetermined to follow: from that empty canvas, from the vacuum of meaning, from the absence that is the precondition of the symbolic network, a signifier will rush to the surface that will seek its validity as a pure excess, as an excess of excess, more precisely as a signifier that, in repetitive renewal, communicating proximity and the distance of desire, fantasy and fear, to be constituted as a fetish, therefore, as a signifier that is valid for all other signifiers in the text bearing the signature of Ingres.
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