Oedipus and the Sphinx

Amidst a rocky landscape, Oedipus (Οἰδίπους), whose name literally means ‘swollen feet’ in greek, finds himself naked in front of the Sphinx (which, curiously, is considered to be male in French and English, while in Portuguese, as in Italian, the female gender is preferred). This monster, which has the face and torso of a woman, the body of a lion, and the wings of a bird, is standing in the shade of a grotto. Oedipus gives the solution to the riddle posed by the sphinx. ‘What creature has a voice and walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three leg in the evening?’ Oedipus answers that it is man because, as an infant, he crawls on all fours, as an adult he walks on two legs, and in old age he relies on a walking stick.

In 1808, this story was the subject of a work by Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, who was then the resident artist at the Villa Medici, in Rome.
 In effect, the artists, paid by the French government, were obliged to create works and to ‘send them from Rome'. In 1827, Ingres returned to this painting. He extended it on three sides to increase the size of the sphinx and add the image of the traveller’s companion in the background, as well as the strange foot depicted below, on the left. The academic study became a historic picture, and it was given to the Louvre, where it became part of the collection. Two other versions of the painting exist, one of which is kept in London.

In 1983, Francis Bacon, whose work has been inspired by the works of classical artists, such
as Velázquez, reinterpreted the composition. ‘Oedipus no longer occupies the centre of the painting, as in Ingres; instead, he is pushed to the right-hand side and left only partially visible in
an otherwise empty centre: a thigh and a foot, abundantly wrapped in bandages and displaying deep and bloody wounds. While, in Ingres, Oedipus dominates, occupying the centre, safely manipulating the sphinx, Bacon transforms the winner into a loser’, wrote the critic David Sylvester (Interviews with Bacon).