The Virgin Adoring the Host

In 1854 France was in the middle of a great wave of devotion to the Virgin Mary. Reported apparitions in a Paris convent chapel in 1830 and at La Salette in the Alps in 1846 had set off pilgrimages and a flood of devotional medals, and in December 1854 Pope Pius IX declared the Immaculate Conception, the belief that Mary was conceived without sin, a dogma of the Church. That same year Ingres finished this picture for the French state, which had first ordered it in 1841. He reused a design he had once painted for the heir to the Russian throne and set it in a circle, the round format of the Renaissance tondo he admired in Raphael. Mary stands with joined hands over the wafer of the Mass, raised on a chalice on the altar, while two boy angels at the edges tend tall golden lamps. The painting was shown at the Paris World's Fair of 1855, and since 1986 it has hung in the Musée d'Orsay, on loan from the Louvre.