Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Pindar and Ictinus

This small canvas mounted on panel shows two imaginary portraits of figures from Ancient Greece. The main figure, whose bearded face is shown in profile, is the lyric poet Pindar (518–438 BC). Behind him, and in shadow, is Ictinus, the architect of the Parthenon, who lived in the mid-fifth century BC. To help us identify them, Ingres has given each the tools of his trade: Pindar, wearing a wreath of laurel leaves – a mark of his achievement in poetry – holds a lyre and Ictinus holds an architect’s ruler. If you look closely, you can see that Ingres has added a border of varying width to the canvas to accommodate the final composition.

Ingres had included a very similar portrait of Pindar in his monumental painting The Apotheosis of Homer, a ceiling decoration he completed in 1827 at the Louvre, Paris. The painting shows a group of over 40 figures in front of an ancient Greek temple, arranged symmetrically around the enthroned poet, Homer. When first exhibited, the painting was described as ‘Homer receiving homage from all the great men of Greece, Rome and modern times’. Pindar, standing on the right of the picture, offers Homer his lyre.

More than 200 preparatory studies for The Apotheosis of Homer have survived. These reveal the wide range of sources Ingres used for the painting. The figure of a bearded man wearing a toga and carrying a lyre is probably derived from the figure of a man playing a kithara (an ancient Greek lyre) on a Greek vase illustrating The Crowning of a Kitharist. An engraving of the vase was included in the catalogue of the collection of classical vases owned by Sir William Hamilton (1731–1803), a British antiquarian and ambassador to Naples. Published in four volumes in 1766–7, this richly illustrated catalogue – many copies of which were hand painted – was one of the great achievements of archaeological scholarship and a rich source book for artists and designers, including Ingres, who shared the Neoclassical taste for outline drawing. Here, Ingres does not emulate the outlines of the illustration, but instead paints Pindar using the smooth translucent glazes of oil paint. He does, however, retain the profile format for Pindar’s head.

Although Pindar was included in the 1827 Louvre ceiling painting, Ictinus was not. It is possible that this double portrait of poet and architect relates to a revised version of The Apotheosis of Homer, which Ingres never completed. A highly detailed drawing (in the Louvre) for this later version, sometimes referred to as Homère Déifié (Homer Deified), which Ingres worked on intermittently between 1843 and 1865, does include Ictinus, although standing on the other side of Pindar. There are several small paintings, including Pindar and Ictinus, that relate to either The Apotheosis of Homer or to Homer Deified, but without exactly matching either. It is likely that Ingres painted these to sell as pictures in their own right.