Venus in Pafos

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Venus in Pafos (Vénus à Paphos) is a painting by French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, completed posthumously by Alexandre Desgoffe, made in 1852. The work is currently preserved at the Orsay Museum in Paris.

History

The story of this painting starts from another commission of the artist. Most likely, in Ingres, a portrait of Madame Antonie Balaÿ (1833-1901), the daughter of a wealthy parliamentarian, and preparatory drawings were made by his students Paul and Hippolyte Flandrin. In the end, the portrait was unfinished by unknown causes, but Ingres decided to transform his painting into a mythological scene, as demonstrated by the evolution of sketches preserved in Montauban and Baltimore.

In the painter's personal documents the canvas is defined as a "scratch for a Venus, painted-portrait", which shows that the work was not a mere picture of mythological subject. In fact, the goddess is very different from those most stereotyped painted by Ingres earlier (especially the Venus Anadiomene). This work is therefore a fusion of the two genera, the portrait and the mythological scene, composed from two different models (Madame Balaÿ for the face and a professional model for the body).

By doing so, however, Ingres joined the naked body of Venus the face of a lady of the French high society, easily recognizable. Perhaps even to avoid a scandal, the Venus in Pafos remained owned before the artist himself and then the student Paul Flandrin. In 1902 Edgar Degas visited the house of Adrien Mithouard, who had recently purchased the work, and once admired the canvas he said:

Description

The painting represents Venus, the goddess of love and fruitfulness in Roman mythology. The woman is characterized by the oval face and eyes with the color between the gray and the blue. Next to her is Cupido that puts her in her hand a golden apple, the famous pomo of the discord. In the background, behind a vegetation that was painted by the collaborator Alexandre Desgoffe after the death of Jean-Auguste-Dominique, there is an ancient temple on one side and a rocky relief on the other. The title shows that the goddess is located in the city of Pafo, located on the island of Cyprus, where according to the myth she was born. As in other works of the artist, Ingres painted the body of Venus without taking into account the anatomical accuracy, but adding deformations: the back line is too curved and the neck forms a strange corner with the left shoulder. These deformations really liked Spanish painter Pablo Ruiz y Picasso.

Notes

Bibliography

Daniel Ternois and Ettore Camesasca, Tout l'oeuvre peint de Ingres, Paris, Flammarion, 1984.
Gary Tinterow and Philip Conisbee, Portraits by Ingres : image of an era, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999.