Joseph-Antoine Moltedo (born 1775)

Corsican by birth, Moltedo was an enterprising businessman and inventor, agent to the French clergy at the Vatican, and director of the Roman post office from 1803 until 1814. Painted during one of the most productive periods of Ingres’s nascent career, this refined portrait belongs to a series of commissions he received from French officials in Napoleonic Rome. They are distinguished by the inclusion of Roman views as backdrops—in this case the Appian Way and the Colosseum—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.