INGRES, JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE. - French painter, b. at Montauban on 29 Aug. 1780, d. at Paris on 14 Jan. 1867. First a pupil of his father, then, from 1799, of David in Paris, in 1806 he went to Rome as a pensioner of the French Academy, when he was already known as an exquisite portraitist, and he remained in Italy without interruption, between Rome and Florence, for almost twenty years, painting there his best and most famous works.
Having broken away from David (v.) at the time when the latter, during the Napoleonic period, was almost the official representative of French neoclassical painting, railed from Paris against his former pupil who lived in solitude far from his homeland, drawn by the painting of the Italian quattrocentisti, I. can be considered the exponent of the purist taste (v. PURISMO) in France. His position in fact can be considered intermediate between the neoclassicism of his master and the romantic ardour of Delacroix (v.), eighteen years younger than he. It is customary to set I. against the latter as an exponent of classicist taste, especially after the Salon of 1824, where of I. there was The Vow of Louis XIII, today at Montauban, the two exhibited, confronting each other's works clamorously for the first time, and after which, the following year, on David's death, I. was elected a member of the Institut. On the other hand, precisely at that time, with perfect logic, I. gradually shifted his interest from the quattrocentisti to the cinquecentisti, above all to Raphael. So much so that, in 1826, receiving the commission for a ceiling in the Museum of Charles X at the Louvre, he conceived for the Apotheosis of Homer a composition inspired by the School of Athens, while subsequently, for the Martyrdom of St. Symphorian, commissioned from him for the cathedral of Autun, he composed a veritable cento of Raphaelesque motifs. To such predilections he remained faithful also during his new stay in Rome (1834-41) as director of the Academy of Villa Medici and in the further course of his long life, both in composition paintings and, indeed, especially, in portraits. And it is precisely in portraits that there often acquires essential value that precision and that acuteness of drawing which, most limpid, has an extreme capacity for summarizing masses and, sharply delimiting their fields, exalts the chromatic values of the composition. A clear, limpid, most limpid painting, which reflects the tendency of his intimate romantic spirit toward intellectual abstraction, whence an ecstatic, almost hallucinated vision of forms. Among his works on sacred subjects are to be remembered: Joan of Arc (1854) at the Louvre, the Virgin with the Host (of the same 1854) likewise at the Louvre, Jesus among the Doctors at Montauban, where there is a museum with numerous paintings by him and ca. 4000 of his drawings.
Bibliography5 works
Emilio Lavagnino