During his stay in Rome, the Duc de Luynes approached Ingres to create an ambitious decor for his home, the château de Dampierre. Ingres intended The Golden Age and its pendant, The Iron Age — two huge murals measuring 6.60 meters wide by 4.80 meters high — to be his aesthetic manifesto and his final artistic legacy. The aging painter, who was already passed sixty, made over a hundred preparatory sketches before starting on the painted decor. His composition, inspired by the Stanze of Raphael in the Vatican, depicts the two ages of humanity since the time of Hesiod. The Golden Age, which is a sophisticated plastic study of the relation between body and space, represents the acme of Ingres's quest for ideal forms and of his quasi abstract styling of reality. Following the Revolution of 1848 and the death of Madeleine, Ingres however gave up his work on the decor and The Golden Age remained unfinished.