MASP

Ingres was a student of Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), a central figure of French neoclassicism. He became established as a painter while still young, receiving important official commissions from the Napoleonic regime. In 1806, he travelled to Rome, where he remained until 1820, when he moved to Florence. In Italy, he became one of the most demanded portraitists. Returning to Paris in 1824, he became recognized as the leader of the French classical school. Beyond the obvious contraposition between the classic and draftsman Ingres and the modern and colorist Eugène Delacroix (1798–1831), his countless drawings show how Ingres possessed an enormous erudition that ranged from the pointing of Greek vases to mannerist art. He knew how to combine all these references in his compositions through drawing, conceived in a purely decorative way, that is, in accordance with the formal balance and without naturalist concerns. This is the case of Angelica in Chains, in which the artist modifies the proportions and the volumes of the body to achieve the desired dramatic effect. The artwork refers to the epic poem Orlando furioso (1516), by Ariosto (1474–1533), in which Ruggiero saves the heroine from a sea monster to which she had been offered in sacrifice. The monster is blinded by a ray of light reflected from the hero’s magic shield. The pagan knight who saves Angelica thus wins her love.

— MASP Curatorial Team, 2015

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By Luciano Migliaccio
Included by Ingres himself in a list of works done in 1859 titled “Une Angélique, tableau” (Cahier X, in Lapauze 1901, I, p. 250) and reproduced in an etching (Flameng, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, XIV, 1re. pér., p. 19), the theme was taken from Ariosto’s poem Orlando Enraged (X, 92). Angelica, the poem’s heroine and imagined ideal of Charlemagne’s Christian knights, was rescued from the claws of a marine monster by Ruggiero, the Moorish pagan. In 1819, in Rome, Ingres introduced this subject in a painting now at the Louvre, in Paris. Other versions of this same picture are found at Musée Ingres de Montauban (1841); at the National Gallery, of London (1839), and at the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge (USA). This oval-shaped painting of the Masp Collection – Angélica in Chains – features a nude Angelica in the foreground which also appears on a preliminary sketch for the painting produced in 1819, now at the Louvre. The handwriting on its reverse side, in the hand of collector Haro himself, informs that Ingres finished the work in 1859, at the collector’s request, based on an initial study for the first version of the painting. In fact, the same female nude is featured with a few variations in replicas based on the same theme or in similar themes, such as Perseus rescuing Andromeda. According to Camesasca, a similar composition on canvas conserved at Musée Ingres de Montauban, is a replica made at a later date for a relative of Ingres’s second wife. Nociti (1994, pp. 99-107) remarks that the painting in the Masp Collection is the only one in the entire series that literally renders Ariosto’s account. Here a Ruggiero riding a hippogriff blinds the monster with the light of his magic shield, rather than slaying the beast with a spear, in the manner of the St. George painted in 1819. The same author contrasts compositional novelties with Manneristic paintings by Joachim Witwael (Paris, Louvre) or Cavaliere d’Arpino (Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale) to render Perseus and Andromeda. At the same time, he related the bodily distortions in Angelica’s neck – a characteristic of the idealized forms of Ingres’s female nudes – to the linear painting style of Hellenic vases. Actually, in those days, the work of artists such as John Flaxman and J. H. Wilhelm Tischbein, who frequently used pure contour lines in figure representation to illustrate epic poems, may have influenced Ingres’s compositional technique.

— Luciano Migliaccio, 1998

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