Imperial Venus - Gina Lollobrigida


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  1. "She holds an apple in her hand evoking Aphrodite's victory in the Judgement of Paris. The room in which the sculpture is exhibited at the Galleria Borghese also has a ceiling painting portraying the judgement, painted by Domenico de Angelis in 1779 and inspired by a famous relief on the façade of the Villa Medici.

    Canova was first instructed to depict Pauline Bonaparte fully clothed as the chaste goddess Diana, hunter and virgin, but Pauline started to laugh and said that nobody would have believed she was a virgin. She had an international reputation for easy promiscuity, in France and in Italy, and may have enjoyed the provocation of posing naked in the Catholic Rome. Further, when Pauline was asked whether she really posed naked in front of Canova, she replied that in fact she was naked, and that it did not constitute a problem because Canova "was not a real man", and that the room was too warm to pose dressed. The subject of the sculpture may have also been affected by the Borghese family's mythical ancestry: they traced their descent to Venus, through her son Aeneas, the founder of Rome..." (from Wikipedia)

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