Joseph-Antoine Moltedo (born 1775)

In its unrelenting realism, exaggerated mathematical perspective, and rigorous local color, the portrait of Moltedo exemplifies Ingres's gothic or primitivist early style. It belongs to a series of portraits of French officials in Napoleonic Rome painted between 1810 and 1814. They are distinguished by the inclusion of Roman views as backdrops for the sitters, as well as by stormy gray skies—a Romantic conceit that serves as a foil to the calm and secure expressions of the men portrayed. Joseph-Antoine Moltedo was a Corsican who served as director of the Roman post office from 1803 to 1814. An inventor of sorts, Moltedo designed a fire pump and a hemp-weaving machine and ran a lead foundry at Tivoli.