The story goes that when Paolina Bonaparte, sister of Napoleon, was asked whether it had been uncomfortable to pose nearly naked for Antonio Canova, she answered with a line that has been repeated ever since:
"All veils may fall before Canova."
She had married into one of the great noble families of Rome, the Borghese, in 1803. Two years later, her husband Camillo commissioned the most celebrated sculptor in Europe to portray her in marble.
Canova carved her between 1805 and 1808 as Venus Victrix — Venus the Victorious — reclining on a couch, semi-nude, holding the golden apple given to the goddess in the Judgement of Paris, when she was named the most beautiful of all the goddesses of Olympus.
It scandalised Rome. Aristocratic women, especially the sister of an emperor, were not portrayed without drapery. The gossip was relentless, and the reply attributed to her became just as famous as the scandal itself...
Canova carved her in white marble so finely that the mattress beneath her appears to give under her weight, and the surface of her skin glows in the light as though the stone were alive.
She reclines today in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, where she has not moved in nearly two hundred years.
"I can't read or write," Canova used to say, holding up his hammer and chisel, "but with these I can create poetry."
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