A coronation lasts a few hours, and its painting may come decades later, from a painter who never saw it. That gap is where the stories hide: a contract that told a painter what heaven should look like, and a ruler who walked into the studio to order one last change.
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How These Were Chosen
A coronation turns a ruler into a sovereign in front of witnesses. A churchman places the crown, often after anointing him with holy oil, and the ruler takes up the sword, sceptre and orb. Christian painting added a heavenly version, the Virgin Mary crowned queen of heaven.
For a painter, the subject offers one gesture anyone can read, a crown held above a head, with a crowd placed by rank around it. The ceremony is over in a few hours. The picture decides who held the crown, who watched and who was left out.
Each work here shows a crown on a head or about to touch it, or a ruler in coronation robes, and each artist appears once. None of the earthly scenes was painted during the ceremony, and several come from painters who never saw it.
12. Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII in Reims Cathedral (1854)
At the right end of an altar in Reims Cathedral, a crown lies on a blue cushion strewn with golden fleurs de lis, and the edge of the canvas cuts it in half. Most of the picture belongs to Joan of Arc, who stands in armor beside the altar, eyes raised to the vaults, her right hand gripping the pole of a tall standard. Her left hand lies flat among gold church vessels and a lit candle, and a thin gold halo circles her head.
The day is July 17, 1429, when Charles VII was crowned king of France in Reims. Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres signed and dated the canvas in 1854, more than four centuries later, when he was in his seventies.
Yet neither the king nor the archbishop who crowned him, Regnault de Chartres, appears. The coronation named in the title comes down to that half visible crown, and Joan's standard takes the place the king should hold, its pole running nearly the full height of the canvas.
Ingres found his reason in Joan's own words. At her trial in Rouen in 1431, her judges asked why her standard had been carried into the church at Reims for the coronation, rather than the standards of the other captains. Her answer has survived: "It had seen all the danger, and it was only fair that it should share the honor."
The halo goes further than history allowed. It is the painter's own addition, since in 1854 the Church had not even opened the case for Joan's sainthood. She had been burned at the stake in Rouen on May 30, 1431, less than two years after the coronation.
At a Glance
Artist: Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780 to 1867)
Painted: 1854
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 240 × 178 cm (94.5 × 70.1 in)
Where to see it: Musée du Louvre, Paris (Denon wing, Room 700, Salle Mollien)
11. Enguerrand Quarton, The Coronation of the Virgin (1454)
In a gold sky, two bearded men in red cloaks, as alike as twins, lower a crown onto the head of a young woman. She is the Virgin Mary, crowned in heaven, her hands crossed on her chest. Their likeness is no accident. It had been ordered in writing before the painter was allowed to begin, by a man who wanted heaven painted exactly his way.