The pupil who outlived the cause
David’s most gifted pupil carried the creed deep into a century that was busy abandoning it. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) trained in David’s studio and made line, the firm contour, the primacy of drawing, into a lifelong religion. His battle cry was that “a thing well drawn is always well painted”: get the drawing right, he insisted, and the picture is essentially made; color is only a finish coat. He held that position with a stubbornness that outlasted the whole Neoclassical moment, and it set up the central fight of the era, which arrives at the end of this story.
First he, too, dressed power. His Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne (1806) shows the emperor seated dead front, frozen and symmetrical, swallowed in ivory, gold, and white ermine, holding the scepter and the hand of justice, staring out without expression. It is less a portrait of a man than an icon of an office, deliberately stiff and cold, closer to a gilded Byzantine emperor (the rigid, frontal, gold-ground icon style of medieval Eastern Christianity, built to feel timeless rather than alive) or a pagan god of judgment than to anything alive. Ingres has pushed line and finish all the way into ritual rigidity. The Salon of 1806 disliked it, finding it strange and frozen, which it is, on purpose.
A back with too many bones
Ingres’s most famous picture is where his worship of line tips into something almost perverse. The Grande Odalisque (1814) shows an odalisque (a woman of a harem, the enclosed women’s quarters of an Ottoman household) reclining with her back to us, turning her cool, blank face over one shoulder. The harem here is pure invention. Ingres never set foot in the East; the cool tiled scene is an Orientalist fantasy (a European daydream of an imagined East, conjured to license a nude and a whiff of the exotic), a projection of the Ottoman world rather than a report from it, owed the same plain honesty as the harem scenes Delacroix would later paint after actually traveling to Morocco. It was painted for Napoleon’s sister Caroline Murat, the Queen of Naples. And the back is wrong. Ingres has drawn it impossibly long and smooth, a perfect unbroken S-curve of pale flesh that no real spine could produce, because he cared more about the sweep of the line than about the skeleton underneath it. When the picture was shown at the Salon of 1819, critics jeered that the woman had two or three vertebrae too many, an insult aimed squarely at Ingres’s competence as a draughtsman: he can’t even count the bones in a back. The funny part is that they undercounted. When a team of doctors actually measured the distortion in a 2004 study, they found it came to roughly five extra vertebrae, with the pelvis pulled out of true as well, and argued it was no error at all but a deliberate stretch, anatomy bent on purpose for the sake of the curve. The 1819 critics thought they had caught a mistake. They had caught a choice.
A closed pantheon of genius
Late in his career Ingres painted the movement’s grandest summary and, in a way, its tombstone. The Apotheosis of Homer (1827) was made as a ceiling for the Louvre, and an apotheosis is the raising of a person to the rank of a god. It shows the ancient Greek poet Homer enthroned before a Greek temple, crowned by a winged figure of Victory, while the great writers and artists of all the centuries since are ranged below him in perfect symmetry, paying homage, an entire Western tradition lined up to bow to its source. It is severe, balanced, frozen, and backward-facing: genius treated as a closed and finished club, with the door shut behind antiquity. Painted the same decade in which a younger generation was breaking loudly toward color and feeling, it reads now as Neoclassicism gazing fixedly at the past while the present walked off in the other direction.
The movement was bigger than one studio
France and David dominate the story, but the antique revival ran across borders and across every medium. In Rome the sculptor Antonio Canova carved the same calm, idealized antiquity in white marble. In Britain the American-born painter Benjamin West painted a modern death at the grand scale once kept for ancient heroes. And the movement had women at its very founding, working at the top of it.
Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807), Swiss-born and working between London and Rome, was one of only two women, with the flower painter Mary Moser, among the thirty-four artists who founded the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1768 (Britain’s official art establishment, the institution that trained painters and decided who got shown, the British twin of the French Académie). It was not a door that stayed open. The Royal Academy would not elect another woman a full member until 1936, a gap of one hundred and sixty-eight years. And Kauffman did not work the genres women were usually steered into, portraits and still life. She painted history (large narrative scenes drawn from myth and antiquity), the category the academies ranked highest and guarded most jealously, and she painted it at the level of the men who founded the school beside her.
