PARIS — Outside the first gallery of the Ingres show here at the Louvre, his gigantic painting of Jupiter and Thetis from a distance might almost be mistaken for a copy of itself — the colors are so lurid and the surface is so smooth. No matter how familiar Ingres is, like all great artists he suddenly looks unfamiliar whenever you see him.

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The Louvre show is badly hung, crowded and claustrophobic. (What is it about French exhibition designers?) But it's historic anyway, the first complete Ingres retrospective in nearly 40 years. France skipped the Ingres show that was at the Metropolitan Museum several years ago, which focused just on his portraits, in whose shadow the modern portrait tradition, from Degas through Warhol to Chuck Close, has evolved. What the appetite is for his other work, the historical and religious scenes — contraptions like "Jupiter and Thetis," which Ingres regarded as his true legacy — is the question posed by a full-dress survey.

The answer, even for those who love and revere Ingres, is frankly uncomfortable. Done with every bit as much conviction and aplomb as the portraits or the great nudes, his troubadour paintings — small, fussy pictures with subjects drawn from medieval and Renaissance history — look ridiculous today: they're stagy costume dramas, disproportionately refined, like episodes from "Upstairs, Downstairs" written by Nabokov.