Ingres could not observe any of his subjects while working on this picture. Pius VII and Cardinal Consalvi had been held in France for years by the time Ingres began painting in 1812, so he relied entirely on a single drawing he had made in 1809 of the enthroned pope and Consalvi seated at his right, supplemented by his own imagination for everything else in the scene^[1]. Wary of pushing his invented likenesses too far, Ingres kept the figures deliberately small and doll-like, adding touches of dry humour such as a portly cardinal squinting with poor eyesight, while the pope himself became something closer to a symbolic mask than a portrait, his tall, imposing figure built up through the trailing weight of his robes rather than through any real physical likeness^[1].

The events behind the painting were recent and raw. In 1804 Napoleon had summoned the frail Pius VII to Paris to preside over his coronation as emperor, a calculated move to place his rule in the line of the old Holy Roman emperors. Relations soured badly once France annexed the Papal States in 1808, and Pius VII responded with the extraordinary step of excommunicating Napoleon. An overzealous French officer then kidnapped the pope, and Pius VII spent the following years imprisoned at the Chateau de Fontainebleau outside Paris^[2]. Ingres painted his Sistine Chapel scene directly into this unresolved standoff, in 1812, with the outcome of the conflict between Napoleon and the old order still undecided^[1][2].

Ingres's teacher, Jacques-Louis David, had painted Napoleon's own coronation scene, the vast Coronation of Josephine, showing the pope present but subordinate to the new emperor. Ingres's smaller picture reads as a direct riposte: it restores Pius VII to a position of undiminished majesty and ritual gravity, deliberately rivalling the scale and crowded grandeur of David's composition even on a fraction of its size, and using the frescoed splendour of the Sistine Chapel itself, including a visible portion of Michelangelo's Last Judgment, to amplify the pope's authority^[2]. Ingres later told his patron Marcotte that he had dressed the pope in white purely for the effect it gave his picture, since he had no other way to draw light onto the central figure, though he also claimed to remember seeing the pope dressed that way in reality^[1].