Absolute power

Valpinçon bather (1806) is the most direct Ingresova reaction to his most controversial (in all senses of the word) picture, on Napoleon I on the imperial throne. Although it precedes in time, this painting is, in fact, a negative, symbolically and iconographically the dark setting that it is Valpinçon bather tried to deny through a literal reversal.

Napoleon is a historical, real figure that is directly posed, hierarchized and ceremonialized to the extreme: the official version that was intended - regardless of the fact that Ingres did not succeed in doing so in the end - for an awe-inspiring reception. The bather is an ahistorical, fantasy figure who is shown from behind in a private setting: a personal version intended for the perception of enjoyment. Napoleon's position is quite rigid, because the architecture of the body is completely subordinated to ideological retouching. The position of the Bather, although equally frozen in Ingres's stylization, still shows a certain curvature, because the tone of the body and muscles is subordinated to aesthetic correction.

Napoleon - who seems to reject everything around him - lives in a dark environment of absolute power, while a halo guarantees him divine attributes. The bather - who seems to attract everyone outside her - is under the even light of potential pleasure, while the turban on her head guarantees the attributes of otherness and exoticism. One image is too familiar, the other too foreign.

Napoleon's head is frontal, illuminated by lunar light that monumentalizes both his face and his gaze to the uncomfortable point of deadly madness and omnipotence, while his body is heavily covered by the excessively luxurious material of the imperial robe. The Bather's face, on the other hand, is almost completely hidden, while her backside - only part of her left arm is covered by a sheet - is exposed, in order to reveal the winding line of her back, while the drapery is scanty in its persistent white color.

But the difference that is the dominant feature in the relationship between these two works of Ingres is not essentially related to the disproportion between the representation of the man in his public function in the political space (which means that the 'ideal' consumption of the painting is open and group) and the representation of the woman in her secret function in an intimate space (which means that the 'ideal' consumption of the image is secluded and personal). This is not just about the usual distribution and exposure of the body in prescriptive and lascivious spatiality, but about Ingres's fundamental method of fetishizing scenes.

In short, the fundamental difference that turns out to be between Napoleon I on the imperial throne i Valpinçon bathers it is only partially related to the quite obvious gender dimension: the degree of fetishization - one image is highly enriched (or, more precisely, burdened), while the other is completely 'dried out' of fetishistic content - determines the placement of these works at the greatest possible distance. Which, then, is also reflected in the temporal contextualization, which marks a new layer of Ingres' script.

As could easily be seen from his previous 'incarnation', Bonaparte as first consul (1804), Ingres viewed Napoleon - regardless of all the superficial flattery, and perhaps unnecessary courtship - as a retrograde phenomenon, because the painter hired prosedées who came from the northern Renaissance to describe him. Thus, the modernist topicality of Napoleon, who almost changed Europe forever, was quickly transformed into an aesthetic anachronism. Hence - by a comparative reversal - the very unrealistic Bather was implicitly promoted into Ingres' true modern heroine.

Napoleon I on the imperial throne is a picture before which both the observer and Ingres himself had to recoil: the concentration of power in that work is so great that it leaves no room - even literally - for any pleasure. In other words, Ingres here uses an extensive method of fetishization, but on the completely wrong person, on the completely wrong objects and on the completely wrong gender. It is the image that emanates discomfort, despite all the brilliance of the technique.

The fetish is a procedure of finding a phallic form in order to - in a spectacular reversion - castration anxiety be deceived: so that the female body - as a corporal sign of the greatest male fear - would be translated into a mode of full voyeuristic concentration. The gaze - in order to assert its own strength, to announce its own potency - must find and create a phallus that guarantees the consistency of the entire signifying system. This means that the phallus is always already a figure formed under hypnotic or hallucinatory pressure, a form exposed to insight in the imaginary region. To be effective, to function as a crucial signifier in the linguistic economy, the phallus must be created/perceived through a certain lack: the phallus is the phantasm of all phantasms (and thus the basis of the fiction to come, but also of fiction as such), as something that does not exist in that place, as something that ostensibly replaces or bridges the real gap.

In this way, the phallus - in order to confirm its supremacy - ultimately depends on the female background, on the female void that must be filled in order not to create a 'vacuum' of meaning. That's why it is Napoleon I on the imperial throne such a 'wrong' image, such an unpleasant image: Ingres's need to represent power as impressively as possible, to enthrone (sic!) political propaganda as aggressively as possible, leads him to excessive use of fetishistic script within a misplaced visual domain. A huge rhetorical arsenal was used, a titanium lens was calibrated, supreme craftsmanship was demonstrated, attention was paid to every detail, huge resources were invested, but the semantic field was completely narrowed. More precisely: precisely because it is the most phallic, this is also the most phallic picture of Ingres.

Within the frame, within the text, within the ideological proscenium, Napoleon I on the imperial throne is a picture of almost unbearable semantic redundancy, frantic repetition. The necessity to locate Napoleon diachronically, or more precisely, to legitimize him historically as a natural consequence of French history, that is, the history of French leaders, put Ingres in the position of an empowered archaeologist who should show how a fair redistribution of power was carried out.

All collected government insignia, historical artefacts of past reigns, indisputable signs of enlightened absolutism that have their source in the distant national past, objects related to past administrations, were successfully delivered to the new owner. But all this signifying diversity (well, as far as it can be said for Ingres, and diversity), is strictly formalized as a huge tautology: each new layer only repeats what the previous one has already said, each new object retards what the previous object is covered. The carefully listed inventory of imperial domination is semantically 'immovable': the human figure is already petrified, already experienced as well as turned into a monument. Not only that: the symbols themselves, richly distributed along and across the picture, are petrified. The portrayal of the hegemon inevitably causes homogenization within meaning.

Symbols - however disparate in form and historical affiliation - are brought under the same regime of regulated connotation, controlled to the extent that they cannot rise above prescriptive tautology. The image combines different historical examples solely to give them the same orientation, the same tropological character. In other words, Ingres brings many symbols but there is only one imperially marked: the Phallus.

The bravery of Ingres's procedure - standing on the side of nausea and horror - is best shown in its consistent obscenity: under the moonlight, Napoleon's head itself turns into the head of that monstrous, somnambulistic, openly fictional phallus composed of a meticulously veiled, rigid, recklessly cruelly erect bodies.