Oedipus and the Sphinx
1864
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.
This is a later reworking of a painting Ingres created as a young man.
It depicts the encounter between Oedipus and the Sphinx, as recounted by Sophocles and others. The Sphinx has terrorised the city of Thebes. Oedipus answers her famous riddle and destroys her.
So what do we have here?
A naked young man, not overly muscular but well-formed.
(Actually, Oedipus is not completely naked. There is a cloak over his left shoulder which has been pulled aside by the artist to reveal Oedipus' otherwise naked form. We see him from the side, which avoids a perennial issue faced by painters of the male nude, and he carries two spears. These are pointing downwards though. Oedipus meets his adversary, not with threatening weaponry but with his sharp (sic) mind).
At his feet are the remains of the ones who came before. The Sphinx is clearly female, as she is in most renditions of the story.
Ingres was trained in the classical style. He would have spent his early years drawing sculptures of the human body, and then moved on to drawing the skeleton. As his competence grew he would have clothed his skeleton drawings with muscles and tendons, and finally with skin. In many ways, this profound understanding of the human body was considered the foundation of great art. In this painting, he shows all his virtuosity in depicting the human form.
Now this could simply be Ingres showing what he could do. Plenty of artists do that in their work. But the nakedness of his subject bears a little more consideration. There is no reference to Oedipus being naked in Oedipus Rex or anywhere else as far as I can discover. So why? One might imagine that Ingres presents Oedipus as concealing nothing, but nakedness serves as more than a metaphor for openness. Nakedness reveals and makes clear our gender, our sex. Has the artist offered this as an archetypal male/female encounter? If so, then not only does Male go on to vanquish Female; the Man is presented as dominant (highlighted, in full view) to the Woman (shadowy and only half-seen).
Ingres dies when Sigmund Freud is just 11 years old, so it would be a mistake to read any conscious re-working of Freud's many thoughts about this story into the painting. Nevertheless, Oedipus' relationship with his mother Jocasta is pivotal to the ancient myth and portrays (at the very least) an ambiguous relationship between men and women.
So it seems that we might have here the male body presented as oppositional to the female.