Venus, Injured by Diomedes, Returns to Olympus

Ingres was in his early twenties, fresh from the studio of the great David, when he worked this up. The scene comes from the Iliad. In the thick of the fighting at Troy, the goddess Venus swoops down to save her son Aeneas, and the Greek hero Diomedes, bold enough to strike at a god, wounds her in the hand. Bleeding, she is driven back up to Olympus in the chariot of Iris, the rainbow messenger. Ingres wanted it to look ancient, so he built the figures from the flat, clear profiles of Greek painted vases and from the outline engravings the sculptor John Flaxman had made of Homer, which artists across Europe were then copying. Down in the corner Diomedes still sits, unbothered, on his rock.