The Iliad

To understand this painting you have to go back to 1827, when Ingres covered a ceiling in the Louvre with 'The Apotheosis of Homer,' a grand assembly enthroning the blind poet as the father of Western art. At Homer's feet he seated two women, personifications of his two great poems, the Iliad in red holding a sword and the Odyssey in green with an oar. This is that figure of the Iliad, lifted out on her own. Around 1850, in his late sixties and the acknowledged guardian of classical drawing in a France that increasingly preferred the colour and drama of the Romantics, Ingres came back to those two figures and reworked them as separate canvases. The sword and the deep red mark her out as the war poem, grave and still. She is Homer's Iliad made into a single seated woman, holding the weapon of the story she stands for.