JEAN-DOMINIQUE INGRES (1780-1867)
Mount Vesuvius (1, 281m - 4,203 ft current)
Italy
In Caroline Murat, reine de Naples, 1814 oil on canvas 92 × 60 cm) Private owner
The painting
The portrait shows Queen Caroline Murat, wife of Joachim Murat and sister of Napoleon Ist, shortly before the fall of the kingdom led by her husband then King of Naples. She is shown "en pieds ", the body in profile, and wearing a black dress. She is holding a notebook on a table covered with green, and looks at the viewer. She is represented in the large cabinet of the Royal, Palace furnished in the antique style, framed by the large draped curtains. Behind her, a gold and crimson armchair. A large bay window faces the Bay of Naples, where Vesuvius can be seen from afar, from which a plume of smoke escapes. The portrait is signed lower left: Ingres Pxit Roma 18141.
Ingres left Rome in February 1814 to go to Naples, where he remained for three months. He works on the portrait of Queen Caroline Murat in July, as evidenced by a correspondence to Marcotte d'Argenteuil dated July 7, 1814: "I work in this moment-cy for the Queen of Naples. I just finished a little portrait of her ".
The work painted in 1814, is part of the series of portraits painted by Ingres in Italy, and mainly in Rome, from 1807, representing the models detached on a landscape background
Ingres began by drawing several preparatory studies, including a drawing of the face (Museum Ingres de Montauban), three studies for the dress and the hand, and several drawings of draperies, furniture, and a view of the Bay of Naples and Vesuvius (Ingres Museum).
The painter
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter.
Ingres was profoundly influenced by past artistic traditions and aspired to become the guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style. Although he considered himself a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, it is his portraits, both painted and drawn, that are recognized as his greatest legacy. His expressive distortions of form and space made him an important precursor of modern art, influencing Picasso, Matisse and other modernists.
Born into a modest family in Montauban, he travelled to Paris to study in the studio of David.
In 1802 he made his Salon debut, and won the Prix de Rome for his painting The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the tent of Achilles. By the time he departed in 1806 for his residency in Rome, his style—revealing his close study of Italian and Flemish Renaissance masters—was fully developed, and would change little for the rest of his life. While working in Rome and subsequently Florence from 1806 to 1824, he regularly sent paintings to the Paris Salon, where they were faulted by critics who found his style bizarre and archaic. He received few commissions during this period for the history paintings he aspired to paint, but was able to support himself and his wife as a portrait painter and draughtsman.
He was finally recognized at the Salon in 1824, when his Raphaelesque painting of the Vow of Louis XIII was met with acclaim, and Ingres was acknowledged as the leader of the Neoclassical school in France. Although the income from commissions for history paintings allowed him to paint fewer portraits, his Portrait of Monsieur Bertin marked his next popular success in 1833. The following year, his indignation at the harsh criticism of his ambitious composition The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorian caused him to return to Italy, where he assumed directorship of the French Academy in Rome in 1835. He returned to Paris for good in 1841. In his later years he painted new versions of many of his earlier compositions, a series of designs for stained glass windows, several important portraits of women, and The Turkish Bath, the last of his several Orientalist paintings of the female nude, which he finished at the age of 83.
The mountain
Mount Vesuvius (1,281 meters- 4,203 ft current) is one of those legendary and mythic mountains the Earth paid regularly tribute. Monte Vesuvio in Italian modern langage or Mons Vesuvius in antique Latin langage is a stratovolcano in the Gulf of Naples (Italy) about 9 km (5.6 mi) east of Naples and a short distance from the shore.
It is one of several volcanoes which form the Campanian volcanic arc. Vesuvius consists of a large cone partially encircled by the steep rim of a summit caldera caused by the collapse of an earlier and originally much higher structure.
Mount Vesuvius is best known for its eruption in AD 79 that led to the burying and destruction of the Roman antique cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and several other settlements. That eruption ejected a cloud of stones, ash, and fumes to a height of 33 km (20.5 mi), spewing molten rock and pulverized pumice at the rate of 1.5 million tons per second, ultimately releasing a hundred thousand times the thermal energy released by the Hiroshima bombing. At least 1,000 people died in the eruption. The only surviving eyewitness account of the event consists of two letters by Pliny the Younger to the historian Tacitus.
Vesuvius has erupted many times since and is the only volcano on the European mainland to have erupted within the last hundred years. Nowadays, it is regarded as one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world because of the population of 3,000,000 people living nearby and its tendency towards explosive eruptions (said Plinian eruptions). It is the most densely populated volcanic region in the world.
Vesuvius was formed as a result of the collision of two tectonic plates, the African and the Eurasian. The former was subducted beneath the latter, deeper into the earth. As the water-saturated sediments of the oceanic African plate were pushed to hotter depths in the earth, the water boiled off and caused the melting point of the upper mantle to drop enough to create partial melting of the rocks. Because magma is less dense than the solid rock around it, it was pushed upward. Finding a weak place at the Earth's surface it broke through, producing the volcano.
The area around Vesuvius was officially declared a national park on June 5, 1995. The summit of Vesuvius is open to visitors and there is a small network of paths around the mountain that are maintained by the park authorities on weekends.
There is access by road to within 200 metres (660 ft) of the summit (measured vertically), but thereafter access is on foot only. There is a spiral walkway around the mountain from the road to the crater.
The first funicular cable car on Mount Vesuvius opened in 1880. It was later destroyed by the 1944 eruption. "Funiculì, Funiculà", a famous Neapolitan song with lyrics by journalist Peppino Turco set to music by composer Luigi Denza, commemorates its opening.
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2018 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau
