There’s a sculpture in the Borghese Gallery in Rome. It’s a sculpture called the Paulina Borghese sculpture. It’s by an artist called Canova, a highly regarded sculptor from the early 1800s. The model for this particular sculpture was the wife of Count Borgese, who also happened to be the sister of Napoleon Bonaparte.

It’s a very, very beautiful sculpture, in which she’s reclining on a divan, nude from the waist up—absolutely beautifully done—and there was a lot of scandal surrounding the work when it was first presented, because being the wife of a Count, and Bonaparte’s sister, it was seen as unseemly that she should have been posing this way. But she was determined that this was what she wanted to do. She was an individualistic woman, ahead of her time. When the sculpture was done, her husband hid it under lock and key and would only allow it to be seen by selected individuals.

So I went to Rome, to the American Academy, and there shot a series of photographs, which is an essay on that entire story. In one of the images I shot, there’s a painting of Napoleon in the background with a lady in the foreground. In fact, one of the pieces has been bought by the Art Museum in New Orleans because of the Napoleonic connection.