Pauline Bonaparte as Venus Victrix

If the world’s most spoiled and vain imperial princess forced the era’s greatest sculptor to create a customized “human action figure” solely for her, that masterpiece is Pauline Bonaparte as Venus Victrix.

Resting in a dedicated room within Rome’s Borghese Gallery is a marble statue depicting Pauline, the younger sister of Napoleon Bonaparte. Originally the wife of the villa’s owner, she cemented her status as the “most dangerous beauty” in all of Rome with this very piece.

The unbelievable realism of the marble mattress is the ultimate show-off by Antonio Canova, the mastermind of Neoclassicism. Pauline reclines lazily in the pose of the ancient Roman Goddess of Love, holding the “Golden Apple” that symbolizes absolute beauty. The cushion that looks like it would sink if you touched it, its lifelike folds, and the hyper-realistic fringes make it nearly impossible to believe this is all carved from a single block of marble.

Pauline explicitly styled herself as “Venus Victrix” (Venus Victorious). In the mythological beauty pageant “The Judgement of Paris,” the Trojan prince Paris awarded the Golden Apple for “the fairest of them all” to Venus (because she bribed him with Helen, the most beautiful mortal woman, effectively starting the Trojan War). Pauline clutches this apple to brazenly declare: “I am the most beautiful woman alive.”

In aristocrat circles back then, a royal duchess stripping entirely naked to be a sculptor’s model was a massive, scandalous disgrace. When someone asked her, “Weren’t you embarrassed to pose half-naked?” this eccentric woman simply replied, “Oh no, there was a fire in the studio.” Do you think that was naive innocence, or the ultimate mockery of societal norms?

During Napoleon’s frenzied period of expansion after the French Revolution, Neoclassicism exploded. Artists and royalties desperately needed to replicate ancient Greek and Roman heroic/mythological figures to cloak the new Empire’s legitimacy and dominance in “sacred” authority.

Pauline’s husband, Prince Camillo Borghese, almost coughed up blood when he saw the finished product—his wife flaunting her extreme sensuality to all of Rome. He instantly locked it in an attic room, strictly forbidding anyone (except himself) to view it by torchlight. Ironically, long after Napoleon’s defeat and the Bonaparte dynasty’s fall from grace, this statue remains the absolute undisputed star of the gallery, leaving poor Prince Borghese as nothing more than a comical footnote in art history.