The Borghese Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres · 1824

Medium

Pen and brown ink and graphite and brush and gray and brown wash, with touches of red and ocher gouache, heightened with white gouache, on cream laid paper, laid down on cream laid card, laid down on blue matboard

Original size

17 × 13.7 cm (6 3/4 × 5 7/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Neoclassicism

This intricate 1824 study captures one of Rome's most sumptuously decorated sacred interiors with the exacting patience that defined Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres at his most methodical. Ingres spent formative years in Rome under the auspices of the French Academy, developing a draughtsman's reverence for Renaissance and Baroque grandeur that never left him. This sheet — built up in pen, graphite, brown and gray wash, and touches of red, ocher, and white gouache — reveals how he approached architecture not as background but as subject in its own right, layering media to render gilded surfaces, painted vaults, and carved ornament with the same intensity he brought to portraiture. The Borghese Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore, commissioned by Pope Paul V in the early seventeenth century, is among the most lavishly appointed chapels in Rome, and Ingres treats every surface as worthy of sustained attention. The Art Institute of Chicago now holds this rare sheet, a testament to how seriously Ingres took his study of the built environment alongside the human figure. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates this extraordinary work from paper to canvas, preserving the luminous complexity of its layered surfaces and the quiet discipline of a master recording a place he clearly loved.