APOTHEOSIS OF HOMER. FROM A PAINTING BY INGRES.
Originally painted for a ceiling in the gallery of Greek and Roman Antiquities, in the Louvre, where it is now replaced by a copy of the same executed by Ingres's pupils. The picture represents Homer crowned as Jupiter by Victory, and seated before his temple receiving the homage of the poets, painters, sculptors, and architects of the world.
THE SEIZURE OF CONSTANTINOPLE BY THE CRUSADERS. FROM A PAINTING BY EUGÈNE DELACROIX.
In 1203, through political intrigue, a French army, raised to take part in the fourth crusade for the rescue of Jerusalem from the Mohammedans, joined with a Venetian army in an attack on Constantinople, then a Christian city, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. The city fell, but later was recovered. Then, on April 12, 1204, the invaders secured it again, and subjected it to a despoilment without parallel. Delacroix's picture portrays a scene in this despoilment. One of the invading barons, attended by his escort, rides on to a terrace, and the citizens fall before him, praying his mercy. Behind lies the Bosphorous, and beyond it are the shores of Asia.
For all this, it is hardly superlative to say that, since art began, no man has ever felt the exquisite and subtle harmony of line to the same degree as Ingres. Naturally the best examples of this, his greatest quality, are to be found in his rendering of the nude human form; and from the "Oedipus and the Sphinx," of 1808, to "La Source," of 1856, both of which are now in the Louvre, he returned again and again to its study, producing each time a masterpiece. His portraits, again, are most masterly, occasionally rising through sheer force of rendering each characteristic trait of his model (as in the portrait of M. Bertin, the editor of the "Débats"), to the extreme exactitude of Holbein, coupled with an allure so thoroughly modern that the whole epoch of Louis Philippe lives before us. In the slighter drawings of his earlier years in Rome, one of which is reproduced here, only the most typical details are chosen, and these are indicated with a delicacy of touch, a sureness of hand, that not only indicates the master, but lends a distinctive charm of truthful delicacy of which none but Ingres has known the secret. It is in such works that his influence will be felt the longest; for, as with his master, the great pictures in which he exemplified his principles remain cold and uninteresting. The "Homer Deified," reproduced here, was originally intended as a ceiling for the Louvre, and from a decorative point of view would excite a pitying smile from Veronese or Tiepolo. Taken bit by bit, as a beautiful exhibition of supreme knowledge, of the evasive quality of style in drawing, it is, however, admirable, and as a whole it has the merits of grave, balanced composition. It was the spirit of work like this which the master sought to force upon his epoch, rather than that of his portraits or of pictures like the "Source;" and the austerity of these principles met with more submission in the earlier years of the century than when later Géricault had shown the path in which the audacious Delacroix threw himself at the head of a band of romantic followers.
