La Grande Odalisque has about five extra vertebrae. Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres painted the nude in 1814, and in 2004 doctors measured her back against living models and found it longer by roughly the height of five lumbar vertebrae. A critic of the day had counted three.
The picture hangs in the Louvre in Paris. A woman lies half reclined on a blue couch, a turban knotted at the nape of her neck and a peacock feather fan in her right hand, her face turned toward us.
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Five is not the number that made her famous. The number everyone repeats is three, and it began as a quip. A critic named de Kératry told one of Ingres's pupils that the Odalisque had three vertebrae too many, and the line outlived everyone who heard it.
In 2004 the doctors who finally measured her found that the quip had been too kind. They also found something it could not explain. The extra length was not only in the spine. Close to as much of it sat in the pelvis, where no vertebra is to blame.
That complicates the usual story, which says Ingres stretched her on purpose. I think he did. The doctors themselves call the lengthening possibly deliberate, but they offer it as a suggestion, and nothing in their measurements can show what Ingres meant.
Who first counted her vertebrae?
A critic named de Kératry, in a remark that was written down only long afterwards. He told Ingres's pupil Amaury-Duval that the Odalisque had three lumbar vertebrae too many, and Amaury-Duval set it down in his memoir of the master's studio, L'Atelier d'Ingres, published in 1878.
Kératry had reviewed the picture at the Salon of 1819, the first time Paris saw it, five years after Ingres signed it in Rome. His book of letters on that Salon, the Annuaire de l'école française, is one of the sources the later study cites. Some commentators went further and called the figure monstrous and incorrect, and accused Ingres of ignorance of human anatomy.
Géricault's Raft of the Medusa hung in the same Salon, and Kératry's remark stayed what it was, an opinion about a picture. That one sentence is where the number three comes from, and it was not put to the test until 2004.
What You'll Discover
What nine tall women were asked to do.
What else is wrong with her body.
Why her face does not fit.
Who the painting was made for.