Napoleon's Sister's Breast Cast in Plaster

Aug. 15, 2007 — Expert male hands applied plaster to the young breast of Napoleon's sister to create an actual mould, according to a new investigation into the marble portrait of Pauline Bonaparte.

Created by Antonio Canova (1757-1822), Italy's most celebrated neoclassical sculptor, the statue is known as Venus Victrix, or "Venus the Victorious," and depicts Napoleon's favorite sister lying half-naked on a couch.

A woman of great beauty, Pauline was the subject of considerable scandal during her time. Her eccentricities included love affairs with low-ranking soldiers serving under her husband General Charles Leclerc. And rumors circulated about her unconventional behaviors, such as having African slaves carry her to her bath, while living with her second husband, Camillo Borghese.

Sculpted when Pauline was 25, only 15 years before her death from cancer, the white marble portrait is one of the biggest attractions in Rome's Galleria Borghese.

The statue even featured an innovative wooden base with a mechanism that caused the artwork to rotate in front of the viewer.

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But the masterpiece holds an even racier secret, according to art historian Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz.

"(Canova) never admitted it, but he obtained Pauline's perfect breast using plaster casts from life," Bernardelli Curuz told Discovery News.

According to the art expert, an examination of the preparatory cast, kept at the Napoleonic museum in Rome, reveals a suspiciously perfect breast.

"This is not the conventional breast of Greek statuary, which evokes a perfect, platonic ideal of woman. However sublime the form, it evokes something concrete and real, far away from Canova's model of idealized beauty," Bernardelli Curuz wrote in the latest issue of the magazine Stile Arte.

The evidence, according to the art critic, lies in Pauline Bonaparte's nipple, which shows an "illuminating deformity." Instead of standing erect and round, the nipple is "slightly squashed, giving the impression of two slightly parted lips."

Applied on Pauline's breast, the plaster would have caused a compression, the effect of which can still be clearly seen on the preparatory cast.

"Basically, it's a wet T-shirt effect," Bernardelli Curuz said.

Ranieri Varese, a leading expert on Canova, told the magazine Stile Arte that he believes Canova occasionally used the banned moulds of real life breasts in his artistic career.

In the case of Pauline, it likely would not have been a problem for the artist to lay his plastered hands on her breast.

"Napoleon's ebullient sister might have found this a funny game," he told Stile Arte.

Rome's Galleria Borghese on Venus Victrix.

The life of Pauline Bonaparte.