in hand.") Ingres thus left himself without the means of producing the necessary unity of effect when dealing with crowded compositions, such as the Apotheosis of Homer and the Martyrdom of Saint Symphorian. Among Ingres's historical and mythological paintings, the most satisfactory are usually those depicting one or two figures, such as Oedipus, The Half-Length Bather, Odalisque, and The Spring, subjects only animated by the consciousness of perfect physical well-being. In Roger Freeing Angelica, the female nude seems merely juxtaposed with the meticulously rendered but inert figure of Roger flying to the rescue on his hippogriff, for Ingres was rarely successful in the depiction of movement and drama. According to Sanford Schwartz, the "historical, mythological, and religious pictures bespeak huge amounts of energy and industry, but, conveying little palpable sense of inner tension, are costume dramas ... The faces in the history pictures are essentially those of models waiting for the session to be over. When an emotion is to be expressed, it comes across stridently, or woodenly." Ingres was averse to theories, and his allegiance to classicism—with its emphasis on the ideal, the generalized, and the regular—was tempered by his love of the particular. He believed that "the secret of beauty has to be found through truth. The ancients did not create, they did not make; they recognized." In many of Ingres's works there is a collision between the idealized and the particular that creates what Robert Rosenblum termed an "oil-and-water sensation". This contradiction is vivid in Cherubini and the Muse of Lyric Poetry (1842), for example, in which the realistically painted 81-year-old composer is attended by an idealized muse in classical drapery. Ingres's choice of subjects reflected his literary tastes, which were severely limited: he read and reread Homer, Virgil, Plutarch, Dante, histories, and the lives of the artists. Throughout his life he revisited a small number of favourite themes, and painted multiple versions of many of his major compositions. He did not share his age's enthusiasm for battle scenes, and generally preferred to depict "moments of revelation or intimate decision manifested by meeting or confrontation, but never by violence." His numerous odalisque paintings were influenced to a great extent by the writings of Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the ambassador to Turkey whose diaries and letters, when published, fascinated European society. Although capable of painting quickly, he often laboured for years over a painting. Ingres's pupil