Le Condottiere

Ingres painted this stern face in Florence in 1821, as a study for a figure in one of his history pictures, one of the armed men escorting a medieval French dauphin into Paris. He kept it, as he kept many such heads, and only decades later, around 1855, went back and added the armour to turn the fragment into a finished portrait. The romantic title came from outside. After the Louvre bought a hard-eyed Antonello da Messina portrait in 1865 and people took to calling it The Condottiere, the name drifted onto grim soldierly faces like this one too. For most of two centuries the picture stayed in private hands. Ingres' own museum, in his home town of Montauban, only managed to buy it at a Paris auction in 2023.