大宫女

Ingres painted this reclining nude in 1814 for Caroline Murat, Napoleon's youngest sister, who was then Queen of Naples. She never got it. Napoleon's empire collapsed, her husband's throne fell with it, and the picture was left on the painter's hands. When it finally reached a Paris exhibition years later, critics went after the body itself. They said the back was too long, that she seemed to have three extra vertebrae, that the anatomy simply couldn't hold together. They were right about the measurements and wrong about the point. Ingres stretched her on purpose, cooling the flesh into a long unbroken curve and dressing the fantasy in turban, fan, and pipe. That last detail, the opium pipe by her feet, tells you this is a European daydream of a harem, not a place Ingres had ever been.