As boldly eccentric as his times

Paris —  HANDS down, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres is the weirdest artist France produced in the first half of the 19th century. His highly refined painting style, built on exquisite draftsmanship and typically mixing heady ambition with a deep sense of artistic knowledge, can be breathtakingly moving. It can also be downright ludicrous. And sometimes it’s both -- in the same canvas.

More than once in the mammoth survey of his career that is now drawing crowds to the basement rooms at the Louvre Museum here, you find yourself dumbstruck: What on Earth could have possessed Ingres to do that?

Take the monumental “Jupiter and Thetis” (1811), which greets visitors at the show’s entrance. Ingres painted the picture in Rome, where he’d gone on a belated scholarship after the French Academy reopened its school there. He was 31. A decade earlier he had won the Rome Prize for a complex, well-crafted and finally rather dull history painting, which told the story of Agamemnon’s ambassadors visiting Achilles in a desperate effort to reenlist his aid in the Trojan War.

Ingres made the earlier prize-winning picture an essay in stylistic variation, which drew on his first-rate classical training in the studio of JacquesLouis David. The picture meant to show how much he knew -- a sort of painterly SAT exam -- and the result carried the day.

Achilles and his lover Patroclus are on one side of the composition. Their listless, elegant, almost feminine figures are contrasted with the firm, dynamic, gruff musculature of Agamemnon’s battle-weary warriors across the way. Achilles, rising from a daybed, holds a lute, while Patroclus poses nearby like a consummate Greek statue.

Together these refined figures are not only Greek heroes. They subtly symbolize music, poetry and art as something distinct from the world of dramatic action. Ingres’ composition suggests art is something fuller, richer and finally essential to the flowering of history. Everyone knows the heroic name of Achilles, after all, but who remembers the nameless ambassadors?

With this entry into the Rome Prize sweepstakes the artist did have his own agenda to consider -- and to flaunt. Everyone would know the name of Ingres too, while the painter-bureaucrats who ran the powerful French art establishment would disappear with time. Ingres’ ambition was boundless, and he cast his lot with the lute-wielding Achilles.

“Jupiter and Thetis” depicts another related story of artful pleading, in a huge canvas dominated by two larger-than-life-size figures. The king of the gods, with one arm holding an enormous staff and the other resting on a firm yet puffy cloud, is seated in the sky on a massive throne. A fierce eagle waits at his side, warily eyeballing Thetis.

She’s the sea-nymph mother of Achilles and a great beauty, and she beseeches the hirsute Jupiter to intervene in the Trojan War on her son’s behalf. She kneels at Jupiter’s side. Like some X-rated Dorothy come to beg indulgence from the Wizard of Oz, she lets her robe slide off her porcelain body and gather artfully down around her hips. Her left hand reaches up to gently caress the beard beneath his lips.

This “pretty-please” gesture provides rhetorical melodrama of a cringe-inducing sort. Still, it causes Jupiter’s wife, Juno, to glare at the duo from off in the heavenly distance. (It’s hard to tell whether jealous Juno is floating in clouds or if that’s just steam coming out of her ears.) Were the painting not so funny -- heterosexual camp -- it would be repulsive. Rarely has the sexist delineation between brute male authority and dangerous female eroticism (and rivalry) been so starkly drawn.

But it’s echt Ingres. You can practically hear the painting clanging.

Composed in sweeping forms -- Jupiter is a gigantic block, immovable and timeless, while Thetis is a sensuous, slithery and compliant egg -- the painting telegraphs monumentality. For a trumpet-style Major Statement, however, it’s also detailed in surprisingly fussy ways. The lure of the artfully tangled folds of drapery and the lavish and exotic jewelry pull you in the least momentous directions. (The ulterior motive: My, look how talented Monsieur Ingres is!) It’s a big, bold tour de force that leaves you scratching your head.

Ingres thought it was just great -- so great that it was the first painting he sent from Rome back to Paris to show everyone just how well he was doing down in the land of Raphael. A few years before, the artist had tried and failed to impress Napoleon with a bombastic portrait. He showed the soldier swathed in velvet, ermine, satin embroidery and gold and seated on a massive throne in a pose almost identical to Jupiter’s. The new painting meant to fix things by returning to classical roots. If “The Ambassadors of Agamemnon Visiting Achilles” was an SAT exam, “Jupiter and Thetis” was a makeup test.

Ingres’ Napoleon portrait was painted at the moment the emperor was attempting to consolidate all of continental Europe under his 5-foot-2 aegis. The picture layers a long list of conventional motifs, one atop another. Its stylistic borrowings included the hieratic quality of Byzantine icons, the frontal pose familiar from medieval ivories and Gothic cathedral tympanums, the colossal aura of an Acropolis cult statue and even the gem-like radiance of Flemish depictions of God enthroned. Ingres stitched them all together to insert the little Corsican into a knowing legacy of quasi-divinity stretching back through European history, all the way to its ancient sources in Greece and Rome.

The painting was not subtle. Napoleon hated it.

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Showing his colors

BUT all three of these works are pretty clear demonstrations of why Ingres got tagged as an arch-Classicist with an acutely conservative bent. They also show something else: They show how idiosyncratic and distinctive -- how frankly weird -- the painter could be.

They show, in other words, his excessive, over-the-top, Romantic side. That aspect of his artistic personality is the one that the Louvre exhibition draws out, isolates and focuses our attention on. What the show does with it, however, is even weirder than Ingres is.

“Ingres: 1780-1867,” which continues through May 15, wants us to think of the painter as a precursor to Modern art. That a conservative arch-Classicist with a Romantic streak might be an incipient Modernist is something of a stretch, no matter how many nice things Charles Baudelaire had to say about “La Grande Odalisque,” Ingres’ (wonderfully weird) painting of a peacock-fan-wielding nude. The artist’s eccentricity is key to the revisionist interpretation.

In the established story of 19th century French painting, Ingres’ rivalry with the forthright Romanticist Eugene Delacroix is central. Ingres’ style is polished, linear and fastidious, like Sevres porcelain or a decorated egg. By contrast, Delacroix’s art is painterly, colorful and fast -- a drama of bravura brushwork anticipating many of the stylistic traits that would later characterize Impressionist painting.

In this story, Delacroix is positioned as looking forward, Ingres as looking back. Delacroix predicts Claude Monet, Ingres predicts Adolphe Bouguereau. And we all know how that contest turned out.

The Louvre exhibition has the virtue of going beyond this simplistic notion of style to get at a deeper understanding of Ingres’ work. Here sensibility is more at issue.

The galleries are organized thematically rather than chronologically, and the choice emphasizes the works’ oddity. After a strange detour into dry religious pageantry (the church was temporarily flexing its muscles in France, and Ingres smelled a client) comes an extraordinary room with five famous portraits of society women from the 1840s and 1850s. Then the sequence jumps back 40 years to mysterious themes of Oedipus and the Sphinx, then forward again to the exotic fantasy of “The Turkish Bath” a decade later.

Things zigzag like that throughout the sizable show. (With about 80 paintings and 100 drawings, it’s the largest Ingres retrospective in four decades.) The jarring, dissonant installation makes the painter seem audacious, even daring, with an outsize penchant for sensual indulgence.

That may all be true. He was not, however, some anti-bourgeois bohemian in search of the dance halls of Montmartre, the next glass of absinthe and a wholesale revolution in taste sparked by the force of his own personality. Ingres was instead painting during an incredibly tumultuous period of French social and political history. His art records his strenuous effort to ride the treacherous waves of shifting fortune.

Frequently the work is mannered, as in a gorgeous portrait of doe-eyed young aristocrat Caroline Riviere, whose pearly head seems inflated with helium. Self-conscious artifice emphasizes the artist as a unique individual with a creative intellect.

But just as often his moving work is profoundly observant, alive to penetrating scrutiny. His acutely focused portrait of the corpulent establishment journalist Louis-Francois Bertin -- an immovable mountain of a man whose soft features resonate against steadfast determination -- is one of the century’s greatest. Ingres chafed at portraiture, feeling that the time-consuming genre took him away from the great themes of history that were an artist’s highest calling. But he was wrong about that.

Even as revolutions swept the globe, Ingres put the power of art at the service of the powerful. He regularly subsumed his individuality to conform to the demands of the state, its academy, the church and the marketplace. There’s nothing remotely Modernist about that, but it certainly made for some pretty weird paintings.