Naked Slaves in Paris — the sculpture that inspired a revolution
American sculptor Hiram Powers’ naked marble masterpiece, The Greek Slave, was directly inspired by his Parisian education. But his controversial masterpiece soon inspired Women’s Rights Advocates and Slavery Abolitionists worldwide — not to mention Queen Victoria.
This former Vermont gravestone carver first fell in love with the Venus de Milo in the Louvre.
As the first American artist to shatter previous American taboos against public nudity, Powers’ aesthetic education reached its crucial tipping point in the Louvre Museum.
By 1843, his eloquently naked female statue, The Greek Slave, had made Powers perhaps the most celebrated American artist of the 19th Century — and a special favorite of Queen Victoria — sweeping aside British Victorian elitism along with American prudery.
According to his own description, Powers’ marble masterpiece depicted a Christian woman who “has been taken from one of the Greek Islands by the Turks, in the time of the Greek Revolution; the history of which is familiar to all. Her father and mother, and perhaps all her kindred, have been destroyed by her foes, and she alone preserved as a treasure too valuable to be thrown away.” In short, Hiram implies, she is a married woman, not a prostitute — but now a slave.
Following her capture and enslavement, Hiram imagined, “She is now among barbarian strangers, under the pressure of a full recollection of the calamitous events which have brought her to her present state; and she stands exposed to the gaze of the people she abhors.” Now she stands stripped naked for sale in a slave market — one hand modestly covering her genitals.
Thus clothed only in faith and dignity, she “awaits her fate with intense anxiety, tempered indeed by the support of her reliance upon the goodness of God.” A crucial detail for her artistic admirers was the small crucifix she still clung to, clutched in her hand (as if to clothe her in spiritual dignity despite her naked humiliation).
Ironically, The Greek Slave was never actually displayed in Paris; yet it’s clear that Powers had received his first crucial inspiration there (and learned as much from the famous French artists and teachers he had worked with so closely back in America).
Prior to arriving in Paris, Powers had first apprenticed himself to the incomparable Madame Tussaud, that famous French inventor of wax museum figurines. Tussaud herself claimed she first learned her trade making death masks for victims of the French Revolution during the Terror (including Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Marat, and Robespierre). Famously, she also modeled that original American in Paris, Ben Franklin.
Similarly, Powers claimed he had learned much about the fine art of lifelike-modeling from Tussaud during her extended tours of America to promote her work — long before the young grave-stone-carver turned sculptor first moved to France (and later Italy) to carve similarly-lifelike forms in marble.
But the first and most direct inspiration for Power’s masterpiece came from his encounter with the world-famous Venus de Milo in Paris — the supreme representation of naked female beauty, only recently installed in the Louvre after being unearthed in 1820.
Also on display at the Louvre was Michelangelo Buonarroti’s renaissance male nude, The Dying Slave. Hence it was Paris, not Italy, that first shaped and schooled Power’s artistic vision — even though he went on to spent the bulk of his artistic career in Florence.
Deluged by complaints that The Greek Slave’s nakedness was pornographic and immoral, Powers stood defiant:
“Gather all these afflictions together, and add to them the fortitude and resignation of a Christian,” he thundered, “and no room will be left for shame.”
Even Queen Victoria, that icon of British Victorian propriety (and English elitism), changed her mind: at the epoch-making 1850 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, Powers’ statue held center court, and was publicly praised (and visited repeatedly) by the Queen herself — and then passionately defended in verse by none other than the great British poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
In America, by contrast, the reactions were more political and less polite.
Women’s rights advocates, including celebrated suffragettes such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, saw in Powers’ statue the symbolic of the plight of all women, regardless of race.
Fervent abolitionists disagreed: in their view, Powers’ Greek Slave was an abolitionist call to arms against the ongoing horror of Negro slavery in America, where women were still routinely auctioned off to the highest bidder. Far from being a moral outrage, they thundered, Power’s sculpture was a moral triumph.
Shocked and silenced at first, blushing American audiences increasingly began to open their eyes to Powers’ masterpiece — especially after Queen Victoria herself gave it her endorsement. Embracing The Greek Slave as a work of high art, not pornography, one American brochure of the era primly explained: “The ostensible subject is merely a Grecian maiden, made captive by the Turks and exposed at Istanbul, for sale.”
Here the word “exposed” serves as a polite euphemism for nudity. “The cross and locket, visible amid the drapery,” the brochure continues, “indicate that she is a Christian, and beloved.” She is, in short, a married Christian woman, not a prostitute — invisibly clothed in chastity and faith.
“But this simple phrase by no means completes the meaning of the statue,” the brochure opines. Instead “it represents a being superior to suffering, and raised above degradation, by inward purity and force of character. Thus the Greek Slave,” the brochure concludes triumphantly, “is an emblem of the trial to which all humanity is subject, and may be regarded as a type of resignation, uncompromising virtue, or sublime patience.”
The only shame in being stripped and exposed to public condemnation was the sin of human slavery itself — not the sin of nakedness.
Soon replicas of The Greek Slave were appearing everywhere — including the chandelier of the Vermont State House, in Powers’ old home.
Vermont
Once again, Parisian artistic sensibilities had triumphed over both American prudishness and Victorian propriety — striking a blow not just for freedom of expression, but for human freedom itself.
Comic Coda: To give this saga a hilarious new 21st-century twist, when I posted this story to Twitter, complete with a photo of Powers’ The Greek Slave, Twitter’s pornography algorithm censored it! So apparently Powers’ masterpiece still has the power to offend delicate American sensibilities even in our internet-savvy, pornographically pluralistic Information Age.
