Roger Freeing Angelica

Ingres painted the picture in Rome in eighteen nineteen and signed it there. It had been commissioned two years earlier as an overdoor for the Throne Room at the château of Versailles, to hang as a pendant to a scene of Rinaldo and Armida by Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret. Look at Angelica. Her neck is stretched into a long curve, her arms twisted behind her, her body drawn into an ideal that has nothing to do with anatomy: Ingres would sacrifice any correctness for the beauty of a line. The hippogriff, with its eagle's head, claws and feathered wings, is described with the same cool precision, and the lance runs across the picture like a ruled diagonal.

The painting was shown at the Salon of eighteen nineteen, where its strangeness puzzled the public; the swelling of Angelica's throat was singled out for ridicule. It was recorded at the Luxembourg museum before entering the Louvre, and it later became one of the works that the Symbolists and, in the twentieth century, the Surrealists prized in Ingres, precisely for its mixture of chilly finish and dreamlike violence. Ingres returned to the subject several times in smaller versions.

Did You Know? Critics at the Salon of eighteen nineteen mocked Angelica's swollen throat, which looked to them like a goitre, but Ingres never changed his idea of the perfect neck.