Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres – Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière – WGA11837 – Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière – Wikipedia
The French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a beautiful embalmer of royalty. His paintings of emperors and aristocrats are as ravishing as they are uncanny, with their rubbery limbs, elongated necks and bovine eyes. His portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Riviere, daughter of a Napoleonic court official, depicts more than a girl – it captures something mysterious and archetypal: part Jane Austen heroine, part fairy queen, part Sphinx. One imagines that this porcelain creature, sinuous and slightly alien, not only broke hearts but turned them into ice.
Ingres was also a great painter of capital “A” Authority – particularly figures I call “bad daddies.” What is a “bad daddy”? He is a man whose paternal gravitas, exacting standards and silky baritone voice combine to make you long for his approval like a parched man longs for water – such is his appeal and seeming credibility. But as he lures you along, he diminishes and uses you. Finally, in the end, he crushes you. He is Saturn in the old myths (devouring his children). He is Brian Cox in the Succession TV series. And sadly, he is probably a million other dads, past and present, who at their worst moments have treated their children as mere extensions of their own identities and legacies.
One of Ingres’ pictorial “Bad Daddies” is Napoleon Bonaparte on his throne. In this over-the-top image of royal majesty, Ingres legitimizes the new ruler of France by presenting him as a fever-dream Roman emperor, broad and brooding, surveying the viewer (and his realm) with cold, appraising eyes. We are meant to long for his approbation and fear his disapproval.
Ingres, Napoleon on his Imperial throne – Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne – Wikipedia
Another of Ingres’ “Bad Daddies,” even more disturbingly severe, is his “Jupiter and Thetis,” wherein a small, vulnerable, supplicant goddess kneels before Jupiter, king of the gods, and grasps his mouth (recalling a strange passage from Homer). In this image of soft, aching abasement before self-luxuriating, macho majesty, Ingres captured the “Bad Daddy” concept in a broadly mythic, universal way. He also revealed (and revived?) the crushing, pagan “fatherhood” (vengeful, judgmental, dictatorial, gloating) that Christianity had come, definitively, to destroy.
Júpiter y Tetis, por Dominique Ingres – Jupiter and Thetis – Wikipedia
Many of us may have flesh-and-blood “bad daddies” in our lives, but Ingres’ Jupiter and Thetis shows that the idea, the presence, the experience, of this fatherly manipulation-cum-judgment is something that transcends the earthly plane. For I think most of us, at one time or another, have experienced a more ephemeral kind of “bad daddy.” It is a demon whispering on our shoulder, masquerading as a memory, an ideal, personal “high standards,” or even God Himself, holy and enthroned. This “bad daddy” wants us to punish ourselves, exhaust ourselves with strain, feel perpetually inferior – and yet desire, with hidden pride, to “prove” ourselves and inherit the mantle of tyrant. The propensity to listen to “bad daddies” (even if it’s abasing and painful) masks a secret ambition to master others even as we feel mastered by our own invisible judge.
Some personalities, I think, are especially susceptible to “bad daddies.” The academic type is one. The academy is called the “ivory tower,” after all, and there is a certain amount of cold-eyed, pagan pride that looks for the approval of idols that validate a hidden sense of superiority. Maybe our “bad daddy” congratulates us for making a “world-changing” discovery, for having an impressive CV, or for giving a particularly ripping lecture. Maybe it flatters us that we “know best” about this or that, encouraging us to sit aloof in smug self-approval. (We are experts, after all.) Maybe it encourages us to revel in the titles of “doctor” or “professor,” especially in certain settings where such labels are received as especially (and exaggeratedly) impressive. In all these cases, “bad daddy” tells us we are good because we have met certain criteria that he embodies and presides over in his masquerade as the counterfeit Lord of All.
Each one of us has a natural longing to be fully seen – and fully loved – by our Creator. Bad Daddy knows this, and he shoulders in, blocking and replacing the divine light with his own spreading heft and sallow glow.
May we have the humility to ignore him.
And may we instead approach our Father (our real Father) in smallness, knowing that we are loved because He made us, because He made us lovable, and because He dwells within us – ever expanding, cleansing and improving us by His secret and gentle designs. His eternal love is free and unmerited, yet richly just, precisely because it is a perfect reflection of God Himself, who is indeed justice itself and whose will defines justice perfectly and spontaneously at every moment. This is a love as big and flowing as oceans, and it does not whisper or flatter but rather surrounds and nutrifies. And it does this in unsearchable ways – in ways the intellect must catch up with and then retrospectively admire in wonder at a providence beyond humanity’s ability to conceive.
I flatter myself, sometimes, that I am seasoned enough, smart enough, and credentialed enough, to come to God as an “adult,” as a “knower,” as a kind of peer – and not as a child. I flatter myself (almost) that I can impress Him or at least aspire to his approving nod. But this is just what “bad daddy” wants – to coax me into a spiritual pride that would make me compare myself with the infinite, “earning” and meriting divine approval, in a constant, gold-star quest to be “good enough.”
At those times, I am listening too readily to my glamorous deceiver, who tells me to grow up too fast and too proudly.
Even wrinkled and gray, may I rest in the arms of my Abba and listen to grand and exacting phantoms no more.
