“The Apotheosis of Homer,” the subject chosen for the Louvre ceiling, was begun and finished within the short space of a single year. The amount of work involved in making the preparatory studies and carrying through a work of such importance was enormous, and Ingres had never before displayed so much energy and decision. The conception of the picture was a noble one. It was to represent the spiritual ties which bind one generation of human beings to the other; to insist on the debt which each worker in the field of art and thought owes to his predecessors; to celebrate the real immortality of genius by showing the incessant action which it exerts on all the individuals who are successively born and developed by its influence. We must confess that Ingres has found a worthy plastic formula to express his highly abstract conception. He shows us the poets, painters, sculptors, philosophers, and great patrons of the arts grouped round the seat of the old blind poet. Each individual face, each gesture and pose, has been studied and thought out patiently, and executed with masterly skill. The terrible problem of grouping together so many different personalities and so many costumes of widely differing periods has been faced and overcome. The whole produces an effect of incomparable simplicity and grandeur. In no part of the pictures are Ingres’ marvellous powers of realisation more clearly displayed than in the three purely symbolical figures of the Winged Victory who places the crown of gold upon the forehead of the poet, and those representing the _Odyssey_ and the _Iliad_ who sit at his feet. What a distance separates these figures, full of feminine charm and of exuberant life, from the cold allegories of the other painters of his time! Look at the queenly grace of the Victory; the disdainful lips, the contracted nostrils of the proud woman, with hands nervously crossed upon her knee, who sits on the poet’s right; and the dreamer who sits on his left, with her mantle wrapped round her, her hand upon her chin, her half-closed eyes dreaming of the far-away adventures of Ulysses. This picture remained in the place for which it was destined for about twenty years. Then it was replaced by an excellent copy made by three of the master’s pupils, Dumas and the brothers Baize, and the original was hung in the Louvre, where it could be better seen and admired by the public and more carefully studied by the painters. Such a display of his powers disarmed even the many enemies which Ingres had made. But the artist was never satisfied. He thought he had not attained the supreme and definitive expression of his genius. He thought he could do better, that he could express himself with more force, more persuasive energy and warmth, in his next work. This was a religious scene commissioned for the Cathedral of Autun--the “Martyrdom of St. Symphorian.”