Lateral inversions and introversion in Ingres

Abstract

The famous French nineteenth-century painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) produced in the course of his career several left to right inversions of his own figural compositions. Because according to the narrative imagery conventions of directional viewing both the original and the reversed scenes should be looked at from left to right, the mirror-like reversion results in a dramatic alteration of the scenes' meaning. Considering that the literary topics that Ingres chose for his pictures often had an affective meaning for him, the lateral inversions may have been motivated by a subconscious wish to exorcise traumatic memories.