Angelica in Chains

Ingres first painted this scene in 1819, a young woman chained naked to a rock as a sacrifice to a sea monster, saved at the last moment by a knight on a flying horse, straight out of Ariosto's old chivalric poem. He could not leave it alone. Across 40 years he came back to Angelica again and again, in Paris, London and Montauban. This oval version dates from 1859, when Ingres was nearly eighty and long the stern keeper of French classical drawing. Here he has stripped the story down. The knight, the monster and the flying horse are gone, and only Angelica remains, head thrown back and wrists bound above her, the pose lifted almost exactly from a drawing he had made four decades before.