The Apotheosis of Homer
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) · 1827
In front of an Ionic temple whose pediment carries his name, the blind poet Homer sits enthroned on a pedestal while a winged Victory sets a laurel crown on his head. At his feet sit two women in red and green, personifications of the Iliad with a sword and the Odyssey with an oar. Around them, forty-six of the great men of the past gather like a congregation. On the left stand Aeschylus with a scroll and Apelles holding brushes and palette; on the right Pindar lifts his lyre and Phidias holds his mallet, with Dante and Raphael among them. Lower down and cut off at the waist are the moderns: Racine, Boileau, Molière, Corneille, La Fontaine and Nicolas Poussin.
The composition is strictly symmetrical and almost frozen, and that is the point. Ingres took Raphael's Parnassus in the Vatican as his model and built a hierarchy of genius, with the ancients standing and the moderns admitted only to the bottom edge. Shakespeare appears only at the far edge, half cut off by the frame, and Ingres kept adjusting the guest list for the rest of his life. Look for Raphael led forward by the hand, an emblem of the painter's belief that art passed straight from Greece to the Renaissance. The signature is at the lower left and the date of 1827 at the lower right.
The picture was commissioned in 1825, together with the painted coving that surrounded it, for twenty thousand francs to decorate a ceiling of the Musée Charles the Tenth in the Louvre, in what are now the Egyptian galleries. Ingres showed it at the Salon of 1827 and again in 1833. In 1855 the original was taken down from the ceiling, replaced by a copy by the Balze brothers, and hung as an easel painting, which is why you can see it at eye level now. Five metres wide, it is the largest statement of French classicism, and its cast list has been read ever since as a manifesto against Romantic taste.
Did You Know? The picture was painted as a ceiling and hung above visitors' heads for nearly thirty years before it was taken down and replaced by a copy.
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