The Apotheosis of Homer

The Apotheosis of Homer, monumental oil painting by French Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres that was completed in 1827 and exhibited in the Salon of 1827. This painting is a clear example of Ingres’s academic approach, and in fact he intended it as a hymn of praise to classicism.

Although Ingres did have a more sensual side (for example, his famous Bather of Valpinçon), The Apotheosis of Homer is wholly an ideal classical composition. It shows Homer as a god, being crowned with laurels by a winged figure representing Victory or (as described when it was first displayed) the Universe. Seated below him are two women representing the great epic poems attributed to Homer. The woman in red, with a sword, personifies the Iliad, and the woman in green, with an oar, the Odyssey. Around him cluster dozens of artists, poets, and philosophers from ancient and modern times.

The ancients include Aesop, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander the Great. The dramatist Sophocles offers up a parchment to the left of Homer, while the Athenian sculptor Phidias, in red, holds out a hammer on the right next to the poet and lyricist Pindar, in white, offering a lyre. The more modern figures are dominated by artists from France’s 17th-century classical period, such as playwright Molière and painter Nicolas Poussin. Ingres includes himself in the painting, looking at the viewer from behind Raphael, in medieval clothing, who is adjacent to the blue-clad artist Apelles.

The triangular, symmetrical composition exudes classical idealism, with Homer placed centrally against an antique temple bearing his name. The Apotheosis of Homer represented the conservative classical tradition against the increasingly fashionable aesthetic of Romanticism.