Who painted "The Apotheosis of Homer"?

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painted “The Apotheosis of Homer.”

Completed in 1827, the monumental oil painting presents Homer at the center of a symmetrical, temple-like composition. A winged personification crowns him, while figures representing the Iliad and Odyssey sit at his feet. Around Homer, Ingres assembled poets, artists, philosophers, and other cultural heroes from antiquity and later European history.

The French state commissioned the work to decorate a ceiling in the Louvre during the reign of Charles X. Ingres drew heavily on classical models and on Raphael’s compositions, particularly the grand tradition of assembling exemplary figures in an ordered artistic universe. The painting therefore became one of the clearest statements of French Neoclassicism’s belief in classical authority and artistic hierarchy.

The work is sometimes confused with other paintings titled “The Apotheosis of Homer,” including a later version by Salvador Dalí. Raphael, Delacroix, and Jacques-Louis David are also plausible-looking options because they were major figures associated with Renaissance, Romantic, and Neoclassical art, respectively—but none painted this 1827 Louvre composition.