Ruggiero Rescuing Angelica

When Ingres took this commission in 1817, the Bourbon kings were freshly back on the French throne after Napoleon, and they wanted their palaces filled with old chivalry rather than empire. The order was for the throne room at Versailles, and Ingres reached for a 16th-century Italian poem, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. The knight Ruggiero, riding a hippogriff, a beast half horse and half eagle, drives his lance into a sea monster to free Angelica, chained naked to a rock. Ingres paints her skin like cold porcelain against all that dark armour and scaled hide, her head thrown back. Louis the Eighteenth liked it enough to buy it for the crown at the Salon of 1819, the year it was first shown.