Probity in Rome

By * Robert Hughes

Classical Landscape, with Figures and Ruins: the title is on dozens of paintings. The image that pervaded European landscape painting for centuries was nearly always of an idealized Rome with its wrecked marble and Arcadian countryside. Curiously enough, the three artists who did most to fix its shape were not Italian but French--Poussin and Claude in the 17th century, Corot in the early 19th. But other French painters, not chiefly known as landscapists, also set down their impressions of that tawny city in which history lay preserved as in amber. None worked with a more impassioned delight than the master whose name was to become synonymous with classicism itself, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. His love affair with the city is celebrated by "Ingres in Rome," a collection of 150 drawings in Rome (135 from the Musee Ingres in his native town of Montauban and never seen in the U.S. before) that opens next week at the National Gallery in Washington.

Ingres arrived in Rome in 1806 with a scholarship he had won to the French Academy there. He was 26, already known as a Parisian prodigy; he came to a town whose social and intellectual life seems to have struck him as a mere echo of what he had known in Napoleon's Paris. A few weeks after settling into the Villa Medici, he wrote to his fiancee in Paris, Julie Forestier: "I cordially loathe Rome ... it is very beautiful, but, in a few words, everything is provincial compared to the great city of Paris." Rome slowly seduced him. Soon afterward Mile. Forestier was reading that "I cannot come back to you before a year is up." The year in

Rome stretched to 14; the engagement was broken. Mlle. Forestier is said to have repelled all subsequent suitors with the explanation: "When you have had the honor of being engaged to M. Ingres, you don't marry."

Smoke in Line. Painters had been generalizing about Rome for decades --nearly every young English lord on the grand tour would, as a matter of course, have some virtuoso paint his portrait with an ancient bust or two in the background, along with some emblematic columns. But every building and vista in Ingres' Roman portraits was specific and exact. Madame Guillon-Lethiere and her son rise against a background of the Spanish Steps, not like personages in a theater of antiquity, but as people confidently occupying space in a real landscape. Civil Engineer Charles Francois Mallet poses by the Tiber as if he were heir to the Roman aqueduct builders.

Ingres was not out to draw from Rome a grandiose nostalgia, a la Piranesi; what fascinated him was the particularity of the city, its palimpsest of styles and periods--as in the masterly View of Santa Maria Maggiore, with its jostle of medieval tower, 16th century facades and Baroque dome. He spurned atmospheric effects (even a puff of smoke, he once remarked, should be done with a line) in favor of utter concreteness. The most-quoted remark Ingres ever made was that "drawing is the probity of art."

Unforgiving Medium. His technique aimed at making that probity manifest. He worked with a fine graphite point on smooth, closely woven English paper. His fame was such that he could still get the paper from England, despite the Napoleonic Wars, and it is still named after him. This unforgiving medium allowed no mistakes. Ingres' line possessed demonic grace and tension; he could capture the whole depth of a vista by the pressure of the lead on the paper--dark black to the faintest gray. Some of his Roman streetscapes are hardly more than graphs made of dots and squiggles, which nevertheless obey the strictest discipline of reality.

His contemporaries were right when they saw his precision as challenging. It has remained so. Though Ingres died in 1867, no Western draftsman except Degas and Picasso (both of whom were deeply influenced by him) has since managed to give such spontaneous exactness to a pencil line. Ingres remains the great exemplar of that process to which most action painting was a coarse approximation--the making of perfect and expressive gestures whose very immediacy is an act of commitment.

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