In 1804, the master sculptor Antonio Canova was commissioned to create a portrait of Pauline Bonaparte, the younger sister of the great Napoleon Bonaparte and an Italian princess by marriage. Pauline wanted to be depicted as Venus Victorious, the triumphant goddess of love. After all, she was in the prime of her beauty – lithe and long limbed, small breasted, milky skinned, wonderfully proportioned. These were her “advantages of nature,” as she called them, and she wanted to show them off.
Canova, however, thought that a nearly naked goddess of love might be a bit too sexy for polite society; he suggested Diana, the clothed virgin goddess of the hunt and the moon. Pauline scoffed. “Nobody would believe my chastity,” she said.
She was right. This was a woman who had her strapping young male servant carry her naked to the bath; who’d been rumored to have slept with half the Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue; who was painted wearing a sheer dress that showed off her nipples and often wore than same diaphanous negligee to court; who’d had a golden cup fashioned in the shape of her breast; and who liked to entertain male guests while lounging in her bath.
[…]
When it came to the sculpture, Pauline got her way (as she usually did). She posed reclining luxuriously on a chaise lounge, nude from the waist up, one bare leg peeking out, her feet unshod, with only a draped cloth to protect her modesty (not that she had any use for modesty). When it was unveiled that summer, the plaster model of the statue caused a gossipy sensation in Paris and beyond.
Pauline loved it.
Bonus:
Here is the statue, by the way.
Source:
McRobbie, Linda Rodriguez. “Pauline Bonaparte, The Exhibitionist Princess.” Princesses Behaving Badly: Real Stories From History-- Without the Fairy-Tale Endings. MJF Books, 2013. 223-24. Print.
Further Reading:
No comments, yet...