Roger délivrant Angélique

The story comes from a Renaissance bestseller: Ludovico Ariosto's 'Orlando Furioso,' a sprawling 16th-century poem of knights and enchantments. Angelica, a princess, has been chained naked to a rock as a sea monster's meal. Ruggiero, a knight passing on a winged horse, drives his lance at the beast to free her. Ingres first painted the subject in 1819 and kept returning to it for 20 years, making smaller versions like this one. That mix of maiden, dragon and rescuing hero was exactly the kind of romantic literary drama his younger rivals in Paris loved, and would soon paint in a blaze of loose colour. Ingres went the other way. He was the great defender of clean line and classical calm, and he gives Angelica the polished, boneless smoothness of carved marble, her throat drawn out longer than any real neck. It is the same rescue the Greeks told of Perseus and Andromeda, only in medieval armour.