Why is it this style?
Neoclassical (Ingres). Clues: idealised skin, smooth as marble , a perfect outline with no visible brushwork, stylised anatomy (three extra vertebrae, long arms, all deliberate, to draw the figure out). The orientalist subject might suggest Romanticism, but the technique (clean drawing, a figure like a statue, no emotion and no chiaroscuro) is Neoclassical through and through. Closer to a reclining sculpture than to a scene.
Worth knowing
When it went on show in 1819, the critics laughed at the anatomy: the odalisque has three lumbar vertebrae too many, arms that are too long and a left leg in a position no body could hold. Ingres stretched the figure on purpose, for the look of it. The anatomical "mistake" is what makes the painting stick in your head.
Oil on canvas, 91 × 162 cm, painted by Ingres in 1814 for Caroline Murat,
Napoleon’s sister and queen of Naples. It shows a Turkish concubine
reclining with her back to us, in the orientalist arrangement that was
fashionable at the time. It hangs in the Louvre.
