Paolo et Francesca

The story comes from Dante. Francesca and her young brother-in-law Paolo are reading together about Lancelot and Guinevere, and the reading undoes them. At the moment their lips meet, her husband is already stepping through the door behind them to kill them both. Ingres painted the subject several times, and this small, jewel-bright version is the one now at Chantilly. He made it in 1814 in Italy, the year Napoleon's empire collapsed and the French artists in Rome watched their world turn over. Medieval lovers, a book, a dagger just entering the frame, it belongs to the taste for the Middle Ages that was spreading across Europe right then. Francesca lets the book slip from her hand as she turns away.