Raphael and the Baker's Daughter

In January 1846 a charity exhibition opened on the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle in Paris, and for the first time the city could see a large group of Ingres's paintings together. He was 66 and back from six years running the French Academy in Rome. Baudelaire, then 24 and writing criticism, went and reviewed him. This small canvas is from that same year, one of at least five versions Ingres made of a single Roman story across more than 30 years. Raphael, working for the pope in the 1510s, was said to have loved Margherita Luti, a baker's daughter from Trastevere, and to have painted her again and again. Ingres shows him with her on his knee, turning away from the living woman to look at her portrait on the easel. Behind them hangs the round Madonna della Sedia, which the legend gave her as well.