A stubborn conservative and a radical revolutionary

The Vow of Louis XIII (1824), as the author's most populist or Catholic painting, marked a complete (financial) triumph for Login: the author was promoted to a contemporary master who also became the leader of an entire school that was supposed to effectively oppose the 'deviations' of romantic aesthetics Eugène DelacroixaBut this painter's established status did not mean that he was unconditionally accepted by critics: Ingres's opposition was constantly present, and eloquent, even humorous.

Which led to an intriguing phenomenon: Ingres' opponents - who understood that they were opposing an author of undeniable power who contained within himself a new paradigm that had to be determined, in accordance with the demands of the Zeitgeist - are always interesting, and often entertaining to read, because they knew how to detect problems that required multiple hermeneutical processing, if one really wanted to tackle the painter's ambivalent position.

From today's perspective, it is easier to see that Ingres - in this he is perhaps unparalleled in the history of painting - was simultaneously a great conservator and a great innovator, a stubborn conservative and a radical revolutionary, someone who, with equal brilliance, knew how to articulate - regardless of his self-conscious inclinations - disparate tendencies in a single manuscript, which was bound to provoke controversy, since the scope ranged from uninhibited and eloquent apology that turned into apotheosis to scathing, often cynical remarks.

This critical division - which must be taken as a logical consequence of the painter's innate controversiality, the breadth of his visual and semantic approach that is almost impossible to adequately homogenize - also implied an inevitable imbalance, which seemed to repeat what was already happening within the painter's frame: the disjunction from the canvas also moved to the interpretative field that formed around Ingres and English sign.

All this with very interesting consequences: while the author's glorifiers were undoubtedly 'more correct' in a purely axiological In this sense, already then justifiably placing Ingres in the narrowest ranks of French painting greats, until then his opponents were more precise in symptomatological view, since they revealed 'bumps' and 'inaccuracies' in the author's developmental line, in the entire narrative that the painter wanted to rigidly establish and control.

The excess in Ingres' paintings led to excess in both praise and criticism, in the already begun process of the painter's beatification and in the parallel attempt at his degradation, even defamation. The only question was when, in this melodrama of interpretative exaggeration, Ingres himself would make an exaggerated, explosive gesture that would, among other things, testify to the tension with which the author experienced his own status in his homeland.

When is his picture The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorien (1834), which was intended to be a spectacular demonstration of neoclassical dominance and multi-planar distribution of the body in diegetic space, and thus to grow into a kind of symphony the author's overall aesthetics, both as artisanal expertise and visionary depth, met with a (partially) negative reception, the disappointed Monsieur Ingres decided to 'abdicate' to Rome and deny his presence at all future Salons.

Here, Ingres's vanity was hurt in his, so to speak, official capacity: as a historical painter, as a master of the techno-poetic manner, as a brilliant draftsman, as a Master whose school began to claim numerous recognitions, as an author capable of offering religious motifs modern relevance.

Instead of harmony between the theme and the aesthetic execution, certain critics saw the chaos of the entire setting in which the drama grew more from the corporeal 'crowdedness' than from the story itself about the future saint whom his mother encourages, with unusual fervor, to embark on the path of martyrdom. The lictors around the saint were too muscular, the crowd was too vast, the mother was postulated too masculinely (as if she did not possess a maternal instinct at all), Symphorien himself was too feminized (after all, the living model for him was a woman)...

But what, really, was the real trauma for Ingres regarding the failure? The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorien, why did he have to 'escapist' accept the (comfortable) position of director of the French Academy, which would also mark a major break in his creative work? Most of the next six years that he spent in Rome, Ingres dedicated to the institution and its functioning, and not to his art. Did the escape to Rome turn out to be an escape from Ingres's painting, or was it a significant, perhaps necessary, contemplative pause?

When the time came for him to return to Paris in 1841 and thus regain the status, and even the privileges, that he thought were his, when he decided to regain the title of supreme master and unquestionable authority, Ingres prepared two paintings that, each in its own way, confirm, that is, give a kind of programmatic character to the author's essential division between his official and private, between socially sanctioned and intimately determined poles, within which his already largely recognizable creative signature moved.

It is as if (fatally, and that is to say with the utmost poetic consistency) the earlier situation with Ingres's dispatchfrom the beginning of his artistic trajectory. Ingres's tendency towards repetitions within the paintings themselves also crossed over to the level of the author's career trajectory, so his solution acquired a conceptual authorial character, because he practically offered the same solution to the problem of indecision in the first case, and too long pauses in the second.

Namely, like Oedipa and Sphinx (1808) Stratonika (1848) was intended for serious, public reception, as a work that respected the conventions of academic aesthetics (history painting was still undisputed at the top of the genre pyramid), a permissible, even desirable referential foundation (antiquity, early and high Renaissance) and, at least at first glance, the author's 'moderation' in playing with spatial-temporal laws in the realization of the adopted narrative, both when it came to the treatment of the environment and when it came to the stylization of the body.

The very fact that he financed the painting Orléans Province, the unsuspecting heir to the French throne, not only practically gave the entire project the label of a state order, but Stratonic marked it as a work of targeted respectability, dignity and the highest prestige (all of which were assumptions, incidentally, on which its subversiveness, in 'normalizing' the Oedipal incestuous tension, was inscribed even more strongly). Although it was known that Ingres would not exhibit it at the Salon, its presentation was ensured in the most elite circles, which overall was also intended to indicate the degree to which the painter had become a member of the establishment.

But on the other hand, like Valpinçon swimwear (1808) Grind odalisques (1840) bore a disparate kind of intentionality: Ingres's more secretive, intimate, obscene counterpoint, intended perhaps for an even smaller audience, but for a select circle of connoisseurs who recognize and share the painter's deepest pleasure and erotic preferences.