[7] In 1797 David was working on his enormous masterpiece, The Intervention of the Sabine Women, and was gradually modifying his style away from Roman models of rigorous realism to the ideals of purity, virtue and simplicity in Greek art.

[13] As Ingres waited to depart to Rome, his friend Lorenzo Bartolini introduced him to Italian Renaissance paintings, particularly the works of Bronzino and Pontormo, which Napoleon had brought back from his campaign in Italy and placed in the Louvre.

The Louvre, newly filled with booty seized by Napoleon in his campaigns in Italy and the Low Countries, provided French artists of the early 19th century with an unprecedented opportunity to study, compare, and copy masterworks from antiquity and from the entire history of European painting.

[16] In 1803 he received a prestigious commission, being one of five artists selected (along with Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Robert Lefèvre, Charles Meynier, and Marie-Guillemine Benoist) to paint full-length portraits of Napoleon Bonaparte as First Consul.

The scepter of Charles V, the sword of Charlemagne the rich fabrics, furs and capes, crown of gold leaves, golden chains and emblems were all presented in extremely precise detail; the Emperor's face and hands were almost lost in the majestic costume.

The answer is that he wanted to do something singular, something extraordinary ... M. Ingres's intention is nothing less than to make art regress by four centuries, to carry us back to its infancy, to revive the manner of Jean de Bruges.

He continued to suffer disparaging reviews, as Don Pedro of Toledo Kissing Henry IV's Sword, Raphael and the Fornarina (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University), several portraits, and the Interior of the Sistine Chapel met with generally hostile critical response at the Paris Salon of 1814.

The French governor of Rome, General Miollis, a wealthy patron of the arts, asked him to decorate rooms of the Monte Cavallo Palace, a former papal residence, for an expected visit of Napoleon.

Ingres painted a large-scale Romulus' Victory Over Acron (1811) for the salon of the Empress and The Dream of Ossian (1813), based on a book of poems that Napoleon admired, for the ceiling of the Emperor's bedroom.

[47] The only other prints he is known to have executed are two lithographs: The Four Magistrates of Besançon, made as an illustration for Baron Taylor's Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l'ancienne France, and a copy of La Grande Odalisque, both in 1825.

[50] He entered in his diary, "J'etais forcé par la necessité de peindre un pareil tableau; Dieu a voulu qu'il reste en ebauche."

In 1819 he sent his reclining nude, La Grande Odalisque, as well as a history painting, Philip V and the Marshal of Berwick, and Roger Freeing Angelica, based on an episode in the 16th-century epic poem Orlando Furioso by Ariosto but his work was once again condemned by critics as gothic and unnatural.

[54] His history painting Roger Freeing Angelica was purchased for the private collection of Louis XVIII, and was hung in the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, which was newly devoted to the work of living artists.

[45] Lithographs of La Grande Odalisque published in 1826 in two competing versions by Delpech and Sudré found eager buyers; Ingres received 24,000 francs for the reproduction rights – twenty times the amount he had been paid for the original painting six years earlier.

[59] The success of Ingres's painting led in 1826 to a major new commission, The Apotheosis of Homer, a giant canvas which celebrated all the great artists of history, intended to decorate the ceiling of one of the halls of the Museum Charles X at the Louvre.

[63] That the outcome of the Revolution was not a republic but a constitutional monarchy was satisfactory to the essentially conservative and pacifistic artist, who in a letter to a friend in August 1830 criticized agitators who "still want to soil and disturb the order and happiness of a freedom so gloriously, so divinely won.

[68] Composer Charles Gounod, who was a pensioner at the time at the Academy, described Ingres's appreciation of modern music, including Weber and Berlioz, and his adoration for Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart and Gluck.

It was commissioned by the Duc d'Orleans, the son of King Louis Philippe I), and had very elaborate architectural background designed by one of the Academy students, Victor Baltard, the future architect of the Paris market Les Halles.

Among Ingres's historical and mythological paintings, the most satisfactory are usually those depicting one or two figures, such as Oedipus, The Half-Length Bather, Odalisque, and The Spring, subjects only animated by the consciousness of perfect physical well-being.

According to Sanford Schwartz, the "historical, mythological, and religious pictures bespeak huge amounts of energy and industry, but, conveying little palpable sense of inner tension, are costume dramas ...

[103] Ingres's choice of subjects reflected his literary tastes, which were severely limited: he read and reread Homer, Virgil, Plutarch, Dante, histories, and the lives of the artists.

"[105] His numerous odalisque paintings were influenced to a great extent by the writings of Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the ambassador to Turkey whose diaries and letters, when published, fascinated European society.

[128] Ingres's paintings are often characterized by strong local colours, such as the "acid blues and bottle greens" Kenneth Clark professed to "perversely enjoy" in La Grande Odalisque.

The rivalry first emerged at the Paris Salon of 1824, where Ingres exhibited The Vow of Louis XIII, inspired by Raphael, while Delacroix showed The Massacre at Chios, depicting a tragic event in the Greek War of Independence.

[130] The dispute between the two painters and schools reappeared at the 1827 Salon, where Ingres presented L'Apotheose d'Homer, an example of classical balance and harmony, while Delacroix showed The Death of Sardanapalus, another glittering and tumultuous scene of violence.

Paris artists and intellectuals were passionately divided by the conflict, although modern art historians tend to regard Ingres and other Neoclassicists as embodying the Romantic spirit of their time.

He scatters persons around the center of the action ... tosses here and there an arm, a leg, a head perfectly drawn, and thinks that his job is done..."[132] Baudelaire also, previously sympathetic toward Ingres, shifted toward Delacroix.

Above all, he was moved by the impulse to penetrate the secret of natural beauty and to reinterpret it through its own means; an attitude fundamentally different to that of David ... there results a truly personal and unique art admired as much by the Cubists for its plastic autonomy, as by the Surrealists for its visionary qualities.

[146] Ingres's well-known passion for playing the violin gave rise to a common expression in the French language, "violon d'Ingres", meaning a second skill beyond the one by which a person is mainly known.

[147] The American avant-garde artist Man Ray used this expression as the title of a famous photograph[148] portraying Alice Prin (aka Kiki de Montparnasse) in the pose of the Valpinçon Bather with two f-holes painted on to make her body resemble a violin.