U Ingres fetishistic system there was also one totem: Raffaello. The key transfer, the key transition and redefinition in the painter's oeuvre will occur - and as a reflection of the Oedipal rebellion - with the help of this sign that will transform the paternal structure and thus the quality of the perversion itself: as it reminds us Lacan, perversion is always father-version, the version of the Father that is accepted, because of everything and in spite of everything.
At the very beginning, the author signs himself as Ingres son (Ingres son): the novice painter is still a 'product' of his physical father, Jean-Marie-Josepha, a sparsely talented artist from Monteuban. Upon arriving in Paris under the wing of the greatest recent master, the author changes sides, that is, he swaps his biological for a symbolic father: Ingres, David's letters (Ingres, Davidov disciple).
But this kind of identification - a necessary degree of identification, before withdrawal and revolt - could not last too long, not only because of Oedipal, but also homosexual tension, if only because of the homosocial structure in his closest environment: in one drawing Paula Flandrina, created after that Fleury Richarda, we see a naked Ingres, in a heroic stance, diligently posing in David's studio.
Hence, Ingres's turn to Raphael - a landmark that would remain valid, of course, throughout the rest of the painter's oeuvre - marked another change: the author finds his imaginary the father, therefore, the father who functions as an imago, a sign in the image, as a signifier of repetition, primarily in the visual field. This (re)turn will also mark the possibility of painting being an object-cause of desire and a confirmation of pleasure: since the privileged subject of Raphael's expertise is the Madonna, that is, the female figure, Ingres now begins to develop his more authentic handwriting.
The ideal male body of action and ethical functioning is essentially transformed into an idealized female body of contemplation and daydreaming. Although he continues to convince or deceive himself that it is history painter (historical painter), which is a 'delusion' that the painter did not want to give up throughout his career, Ingres will achieve the best, most brilliant, most sincere as well as the most artificial results by persistently fetishistically developing the emphatically found female theme. Instead symbolic depiction of a historical or mythical spectacle, Ingres - in the depths of the unconscious - opts for imagine staging, as the hidden foundation of his painting.
In short, the transition from David to Raphael, from active i current master of the the past, a Renaissance genius, marks the establishment of Ingres' heterosexual axis that will be able to guarantee both visual and erotic enjoymentThe satisfaction will, therefore, be enhanced because its always problematic verification through, so to speak, an even more indisputable version of the accepted father, has been given the halo of exemplary character and historical-artistic legitimacy.
The replacement of the poetic model takes place along the sexual line. Ingres will find the emblem of this irreversible transfer in Raphael's captivating masterpiece, Madonna of the Chair (1514), which will appear - and again, a symptom that passes into sinthome, a materialized trace of pleasure - with excessive frequency in the formative part of the author's career.
Raphael's tondo, which, except in one obvious case, was incorporated completely 'unmotivatedly', a detail that could have been done without, both in the iconographic and narrative sense, thus becomes Ingres' testimony that the transition was successfully and consistently carried out, that it acts as a solid poetic center regardless of the distractions to which the painter had to - presumably for commercial reasons - agree.
If we exclude, of course, Raffaella i Fornarino (1814), about which we have already written in Art, where Madonna of the Chair natural part of the environment, in the other three pictures, Philibert River (1804-5), Napoleon I on the imperial throne (1808) and Henry IV plays with his children (1817), the presence of the Renaissance tondo is 'out of place', an inexplicable excess that seems to serve no purpose. What is Ingres actually suggesting with this 'empty' gesture?
The vision of the mother connotes the paternal reconfiguration that the painter has undergone. In paintings with an 'imposed' male subject that the painter no longer experiences as 'his', as an orthodox source of confirmation and pleasure, Raphael's tondo - a constant diachronic reminder, a direct embodiment of desire - indicates where Ingres's true interest lies. Hence this emblem is a kind of dual, substitutional, but also consistent Ingres signature.
In London in 1848, a group of authors, led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Huntom i John Everett Millaisom, to found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a 'movement' that would seek to return (English) painting to a period before the High Renaissance synthesis of the Italian Master, to an age of more naive or innocent realism and a more direct presentation of visual, or diegetic, space.
But, didn't Ingres - at least in his Gothic 'byways' - greatly anticipate and even elaborate on this tendency. And doesn't the Raffaello reference help us - again with the retroactive help of Ingres - to redefine yet another historical phase in the development of European painting. What is it about? If Raffaello already during his lifetime, and even more strongly after his death, became a symbol, or as we said, even a totem of the perfection of a paradigm, then the Mannerist authors should - with a dose of multiple precision - be characterized precisely as Post-Raphaelites.
Because, Raffaello stands as the embodiment of color harmony, compositional balance and proportionality, exceptional technical refinement, therefore, as an unattainable role model in relation to which younger authors - in an act of (sub)conscious rebellion and distance - will turn towards anxious, but necessary opposing procedures of distortion, elongation and deviation within the traditional visual domain: Mannerism can no longer imagine not only the ideal form of the human figure, but also the ideal - untouched by 'errors', untainted by 'failures' - form of painting itself as art.
In this sense, Ingres as a (premature) Pre-Raphaelite and (late) Post-Raphaelite is an innovative Gothic Mannerist, a decadent who understands that anomaly is necessary in the visual construction of beauty that is an abstract, not a natural phenomenon. Should, then, some of his emblems be read in an unexpected art-historical perspective? For example, is the real reason for Ingres's fascination with Madonna of the Chair in that Raphael himself - due to the demanding circular composition of the tondo - fell into the heresy of deformation that the Mannerists would accept as a blessing (the Virgin's too-thick right hand, the same left leg of Jesus, since they are in the foreground)? Is this also a trace of Raphael's future development that, if not for his premature death, would have ended at least partially in Mannerism, after all, just like Michelangelo?
Let's consider another sign/indication/symptom along this line. The bracelet worn by Fornarina on her right hand is strikingly similar to the one worn by the Great Odalisque on her right hand, which is, in turn, almost identical to the one worn by the Great Odalisque on her right hand. Doña Isabel de Requesens and Enriquez de Cordona-Anglesola (1518)
This painting, which was thought, in the nineteenth century, to be a portrait of Raphael Joan of Aragon, even when her attributions are corrected, still functions as an (extra)textual legitimation of Ingres's de-construction method: the elongated arms of the Neapolitan noblewoman, which seem to be 'irregularly' placed on her shoulders, making her entire body appear larger in relation to her beautiful head, can subsequently be read as Ingres's accepting reference to the procedure in which she Julius Roman carried out a Mannerist corruption of Raphael's idealized mise-en-scène.
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