Ingres writes in 1847 to Mrs Moist: 'Madame, would you be so kind as to come tomorrow around two o'clock to pose, with bare hands (underlined by AB) and with charming Catherine'. Ingres writes, in June 1852, to Madame Moitessier, after he decided to return to portraiture: 'Madame, there is an appointment for tomorrow, with bare hands (underlined by AB) and, if possible, a yellow dress'.
Mrs. Marie-Clotilde-Inès Moitessier (1856), in many respects, represents the ideal realization of Ingres's (un)conscious program, the ideal combination of the painter's inner urges, be they purely painterly or purely libidinous, and external imperatives, the author's temptation to the extent that personal projection can be an index of symbols and desires, and so as not to violate the recognizable realistic vision. The quality of synthesis can be seen in the way in which the painter brilliantly treats the subject of mirrors, female figures and fashion: Madame Moitessier is not only a picture, but also composition within the composition.
As a confirmation of the author's, or more precisely, the author's inclination, the time - as much as twelve years - that was necessary to complete the portrait can serve even better: Madame Moitessier is the work of numerous attempts and failures, starting, stopping and giving up, formulations and listening, imagining and rethinking. All those setbacks and obstacles (almost all of them the painter himself set himself) would have been fatal if there had not been a continuity of desire behind it: desire as a unifying factor and a guarantee of completion, more precisely climax. It was precisely this persistence of desire that ensured the continuation of the fascination, even when there was a kind of disintegration, a doubling, in short, until the moment when Madame Moitessier received her unexpected double.
Consistency of desire ensures that the process of turning the perspective passes without compromising semantic and iconographic coherence: in order to achieve the former, original portrait, it was necessary to realize it Second the portrait, the one with which the painter fulfills his legal obligations, the contract he has already signed, the desire he has already initiated. Mrs. Marie-Clotilde-Inès Moitessier (1851) is perfect negative without whom she could not do it develop the 'real' Madame Moitessier, a necessarily necessary transitional stage leading to the authentic one destinations, a vision that only cemented the power and fascination of the one that would follow.
In the portrait from 1851, the lady is standing, in the one from 1856, she is sitting; the flowers in her hair will transfer to the dress; the dress in the first picture is black, dignified and austere, in the second white, luxurious and spread out; the gaze initially wanders unspecified into the distance, and then enters into, nevertheless, distanced communication; the empty background will essentially turn into empty mirror space, as a new reflective layer is added. It was as if it was inevitable that in Ingres's fetishistic procedure, perhaps unintentionally, but certainly deeply logically, at some point there would be a self-satisfied doubling, a visionary doubling, a doubling of optics: developmental importance Madame Moitessier from 1851 is also in the fact that, due to such a constellation, Madame Moitessier from 1856, not only a picture, but also a mirror, indeed, a mirror within a mirror.
The mirror in which the final specular figure is obtained, in which the transitional Madame Moitessier takes on her own original form, in which the entire author's quest is conveyed as it can be embodied beautiful ideal, in which it mirrors Ingres's opus focused on the female figure. But, Madame Moitessier is literally the final explanation of the metaphorical use of the mirror in the development sequence of the author's three most significant female portraits: the final point in which the function of the author's speculation, that is, the way reflection becomes part of a strategy in which idealization always means denial of nature (even society).
As she also showed Madame de Senonnes (1814), for Ingres the mirror is not an additional frame that serves to expand the space in which the model is placed or to subjugate an already fantasy rhetoric at least partially to a perspective logic that would normalize the resulting representation. In this portrait, the reflected figure does not contribute to the deepening of the character, but is only - located at the edge of the picture - a dark, disembodied remnant of a being that has suddenly fallen out of the dominant visual regime.
The mirror, on the other hand, in Louise, Countess Othenin of Haussonville (1845) is more conventionally placed, as it provides Ingres with an angle from which the fetishistic devotion to the hair, neck and back can be equated with the author's effort to three-dimensionally encompass the object of fascination, more precisely, to observe the figure through several comparative points of view. In that progression, Madame Moitessier represents a problematic culmination, because for the first and only time in Ingres' paintings, the face of the model in the mirror is also represented. But that captured face seems to belong even less to Madame Moitessier than the hair and neck to Madame de Senonnes and d'Haussonville.
Presented in profile, it is a 'falsification' with a slightly abstract charge, a marvelous incongruity with the model that was 'fronted' in the splendor of Ingres's late stylization, which is why it is associated, for example, with the author's earlier works, and the figure in the reflection acquires - in a rougher to the description of beauty - strong erotic intonation through dual dislocation. The mirror does not contribute to spatial-temporal expansion, but to characterful, imaginative deployment, as a topos in which those things that, even in the most detailed expression, need to be re-seen can be postponed.
In the 'rigidity' of the pose, in the color tonality that confirms the painter's indignation against nuances that imitate vitality and life relief (for example, the color of the skin may be monotonous and cold, but any other mode would violate its perfect paleness for the sake of an already overrated illusionism), in the concentration author's control, we follow how Ingres's monumental vision transforms Madame Moitessier into a monument: a staging intended for worship and reverence, since in it the sign triumphed over life, not over insight and further research.
For Ingres, hands in paintings can be made of rubber or marble, but not flesh and blood. They are sculptural, perfectly polished, without bumps and unpleasant discolorations. Even in his only portrait of an elderly woman, Countess of Tournon (1812), the same graying applies: the face is also depicted with realistic conviction, but the hands seem to remain outside (or above) the flow of time, untouched by cycles and disturbances. As if Ingres simply could not allow nature to leave an unwanted stamp on that part of the female figure.
Unlike the face, which changes 'arbitrarily' and must satisfy even the rudimentary imperatives of similarity, the hands are completely left to the author's imagination, where the pleasure derives from the necessity of repetition and the necessity of stylization. In a letter in which Ingres almost voluptuously violates social etiquette, he urges his favorite model, Madame Moitessier, to come to the studio after her summer vacation: 'Therefore, Tan Madame, Moorish Madame, you will be welcome', but not to urgently note that a new color distinction, a modification that suddenly appeared, but to - again and again - paint those same perfectly white, perfectly pale hands and skin that the Sun is not and cannot desecrate.
Painting a portrait is a matter of prioritizing, determining anchor points, while secondary elements - well, even if it was the model's young daughter or her toilet, as in the first quoted letter - are subject to change or complete ignoring. For Ingres, mimesis is accidental, while fetish is substantial.
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