Grande Odalisque

A luxurious couch draped in rich blue fabric and delicate embroidery.
A reclining nude, her back turned to us, casts a cool, detached gaze in our direction.
In her hand rests a fan fashioned from peacock feathers.
At her feet sit a hookah and an incense burner.

The Paris Salon of 1819.
When this painting was unveiled for the first time, it was met with fierce condemnation.
"She has three vertebrae too many."
"No bone, no muscle, no blood, no life."

Critics mocked Ingres mercilessly, claiming he had committed an amateurish blunder born of a failure to understand human anatomy.

Yet in recent years, modern medical investigations have brought an astonishing truth to light.
A scientific analysis conducted in 2004.
According to its findings, it was far more than a matter of three vertebrae.

Her entire back and pelvis had been elongated by the equivalent of roughly five vertebrae.

Furthermore, her left arm is markedly shorter than her right, resulting in a posture physically impossible for a living human.
And this was by no means an error in draftsmanship.
Ingres was a painter of supreme technical mastery.
He had deliberately distorted the human form.

Rome, 1814.
Ingres received the commission for this painting from Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples.
The queen's husband had previously purchased Ingres's "The Sleeper of Naples."
It was a painting of a nude woman sleeping on her back.

The queen wished for a companion piece to pair with it.

Ingres prepared a canvas of the exact same dimensions.
To contrast with the supine figure, he chose a pose with her back turned, looking over her shoulder.
Yet the following year, in 1815.
With the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, the Murat regime fell.

The queen's husband was executed.

Having lost his patron, the artist was left unpaid.
Aided by his friend, the painter Dupré, Ingres had to personally retrieve the painting that was originally bound for Naples.