Artist as Lover: Rereading Ingres'sRaphael and the Fornarina

Abstract

Between 1813 and 1860, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres made five paintings and one signed drawing and supervised the production of four prints, all on the theme of the Renaissance master Raphael and his legendary lover and portrait subject, the Fornarina (Fig. 1). At his death in 1867 a final painted version remained unfinished. Even at that late date the artist's investment in what clearly was a particularly meaningful subject for him remained undiminished: Ingres wrote that he hoped this ‘dernière édition’ would erase the memory of those that preceded it.1 These pictures have attracted considerable artistic interest and art-historical interpretation. Recognised, on the one hand, as prime examples of Ingres's habitual working method, based on recursions and returns, the series has, on the other, also seemed to speak to the powerful and enduring conceptual model of artistic creativity actively consolidated in text and image in the nineteenth century. According to this still-familiar account, the setting of the artist's studio enshrined the relations between artist and model that underwrote the creative enterprise more broadly. In this construal, artistic prowess is expressly linked to erotic attachment to the female body, at once as sexual object and artistic subject. The implications of this development — and the foundational power of this mythology of the artist — are far-reaching. Indeed, the heterosexual basis for artistic creativity and innovation has been so vital to our understanding of the modern artist that it could be considered axiomatic.2