In August of 1803, Pauline Bonaparte married the richest man in Italy, Prince Camillo Borghese. Pauline was Napoleon’s favorite sister. She was also a woman with a racy reputation thanks to the amorous indiscretions she pursued during her first marriage to Colonel Victor Emmanuel Leclerc. Not suprisingly, Pauline’s penchant for sleepovers followed her into her second marriage – a fact that greatly upset Prince Borghese and induced him to place his wife under house arrest.
But house arrest did little to quell the appetites of Mrs. Bonaparte Borghese, who, in addition to collecting men, liked to indulge in retail therapy, buying closets full of clothes and accessories that enhanced her celebrated beauty.
Ephemeral admirations do not seem to have been enough for Pauline, however, for she commissioned the Italian sculptor Canova to render her likeness in marble. Scandalously (for this just wasn’t done in the early nineteenth century) she posed almost nude as Canova created Pauline Borghese as Venus Victrix (left, now in Rome’s Galleria Borghese). In Canova’s lush neo-classical composition, the sensuous Pauline holds an apple. It’s a prop that is meant to liken her to Venus by reminding us that Paris, the young Trojan shepherd boy, awarded the goddess of love a golden apple bearing the words “for the fairest.” Paris’ judgment, of course, provoked the first world war. In return for choosing Venus as the fairest goddess, he was allowed to seduce the world’s most beautiful woman, Helen. The rest is history (or myth) for when Paris wooed the already-married Greek Helen back to Troy, the Greeks launched a 1000-ship navy and thereby started the long and bloody Trojan War. And so it is not hard to see Canova’s sculpture of Pauline Bonaparte as a powerful expression of the confidence she found in her beauty and in her sexual power.
As all women (and many men) know, maintenance is always important to beauty. This spring, Rome celebrates the sheer effort that Pauline Borghese must have expended in order to keep up appearances. An advertising campaign (right) for the Province of Rome’s Spring Festival shows us Pauline as she prepares to attend one of the many unmissable events scheduled to celebrate the coming of spring. Hair rolled in curlers and with a blow-dryer in her hand, she’s a reminder that image is everything.
