A Morte de Leonardo da Vinci (1851)

Ingres painted the first version of this in Rome in 1818, for the French ambassador to the papal court. The Bourbons were back on the throne after Napoleon and there was a market in Paris for small, highly finished scenes from the national past, the kind of picture then called troubadour. The moment is Leonardo dying at Amboise in 1519 with Francis the First holding his head, an anecdote Vasari printed some 30 years later. Records of the king's movements put him elsewhere that week. Ingres painted the scene again all the same, this version in 1851, when he was 71 and had just given up his teaching chair at the École des Beaux-Arts. The canvas is about 40 by 50 centimetres, and the room around the bed is packed with figures right up to the edges.