Papa Pio VII nella Cappella Sistina

Ingres finished this in 1814, and the timing is everything. For five years Pope Pius VII had been Napoleon's prisoner, hauled off from Rome and held in France after the two men fell out over the empire. Napoleon's fall in the spring of 1814 set him free, and by May the pope was back in Rome. Ingres, a young French painter living there, shows him restored to his own chapel, seated in state and saying Mass beneath Michelangelo's Last Judgment, cardinals ranked along the painted walls. He sent the picture to the Paris Salon of 1814, the first held after the monarchy came back. The small figure of the pope sits dwarfed by the great fresco behind him, at home again in the room Napoleon had emptied of him.