Júpiter y Tetis

Ingres painted this in Rome in 1811, aged 30 and finishing his years as a state-funded student at the French Academy there. It was his required final submission, the piece meant to prove what all that training had made of him. He took the opening of Homer's Iliad, where the sea-nymph Thetis kneels to beg Jupiter to help her son Achilles. And he pushed the bodies into shapes anatomy does not allow. Jupiter sits like a vast immovable idol, and Thetis coils toward him with a neck and arm that seem to have too many curves, boneless, almost liquid. When it reached Paris the critics were baffled and complained the figures were flat and out of proportion. He kept the painting himself for more than 20 years before the French state finally bought it from him.