Paolina Borghese Bonaparte (CANOVA)

Antonio Canova's marble portrait of Paolina Borghese as "Venus Victrix," completed between 1805 and 1808, is among the most famous works of European Neoclassicism. Paolina, Napoleon's younger sister and wife of the Roman prince Camillo Borghese, posed for Canova reclining on a couch in the pose of a triumphant Venus, holding the golden apple of the Judgement of Paris. The statue, now in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, scandalised contemporaries for its frank sensuality; when a visitor asked Paolina whether she had truly posed nude, she is said to have answered: "Oh, but it was not cold — there was a stove in the studio."