黄金时代

Ingres was in his early 80s when he painted this small canvas in 1862, and it carried a private disappointment. Nearly 20 years earlier the Duc de Luynes had hired him to cover a wall at the château de Dampierre with a vision of humankind's first, blessed age. He worked at it from 1843, then the Revolution of 1848 came and his wife died, and he never finished the mural. This reduced version, painted from that unrealised wall, packs dozens of nude figures into an untroubled grove where nobody labours or grieves. He set the scene in the mythical Golden Age the ancient poets described, when the earth gave food freely and the gods still walked among people. He kept refining these bodies into his final years, long after the wall itself had defeated him.