Grande Odalisque
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) · 1814
A woman lies on a divan with her back to you and turns her head to meet your eye, cool and unhurried. The props announce a harem: a turban of striped silk, a peacock-feather fan, a jewelled fly whisk, a hookah at her feet. Ingres had never seen one. He was working in Rome from travellers' accounts and from a European tradition of reclining Venuses, and the room is less an Ottoman interior than a stage set of blue satin and shadow.
Count the vertebrae if you like, because critics did. The spine has been given something like three extra units, the left arm is longer than the right, the right breast sits oddly under the armpit and the small left foot barely connects to a leg. Ingres distorted anatomy in the service of an unbroken contour, a single long curve that runs from the shoulder round the hip to the knee. The paint is applied so smoothly that brushwork almost disappears, and the flesh is modelled in cold porcelain tones against the warm gold of the curtain. Draughtsmanship, for Ingres, outranked truth.
The canvas was commissioned by Caroline Murat, Napoleon's sister and Queen of Naples, who never took delivery because her husband's regime collapsed. Ingres finally showed it at the Paris Salon of 1819, where one critic complained that the figure had neither bones nor muscles. The Louvre bought it in 1899 by public subscription. In 1989 the Guerrilla Girls put her on a poster asking whether women have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum, which gave the odalisque a second career as a feminist emblem.
Did You Know? Anatomists have calculated that Ingres added roughly three extra lumbar vertebrae to lengthen her back into a single sweeping curve.
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