Joseph-Antoine Moltedo

Ingres painted this in Rome around 1810, when the city was under Napoleon's control and full of French administrators. Joseph-Antoine Moltedo was one of them, a Corsican businessman who ran the Roman postal service from 1803 until Napoleon's power collapsed in 1814. Ingres, still young and making his name, took a run of commissions from officials like him. Behind Moltedo he set the ruins every visitor knew, the Appian Way and the Colosseum, under a heavy gray sky that runs against the man's calm, self-possessed look. He turns slightly toward us, dark-eyed and steady, in plain dark clothes. The empire that had given Moltedo his post in Rome would be gone within four years of the sitting.