Musée Ingres-Bourdelle - Roger délivrant Angélique, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

This version of Roger Delivering Angelica from 1841 at the Musée Ingres-Bourdelle returns to the Ariosto subject that Ingres had first painted in 1819, finding in the Orlando Furioso a narrative vehicle that allowed him to combine heroic male action with the display of the female nude within a literary and chivalric framework. Ariosto's Renaissance epic was a source Ingres returned to repeatedly throughout his career, drawn by its combination of classical and romantic elements — classical composition and Renaissance subject matter, chivalric romance and Greco-Roman beauty. By 1841 he had refined his treatment, and the version at Montauban represents his mature command of the subject that had occupied him for more than two decades. His oil surfaces, built through meticulous underdrawing and smooth controlled layers that eliminated visible brushwork, created a technical consistency that his critics found cold but his admirers considered the highest achievement of modern painting. The Musée Ingres-Bourdelle holds this among the largest single collection of Ingres's works outside the Louvre.

The dynamic composition contrasts the armored knight's movement with the static beauty of the chained Angelica. Ingres's precise contours and polished surface create a scene of Romantic narrative rendered in Neo-classical technique.