Femme piquée par un serpent - Auguste Clésinger

This statue, along with Thomas Couture's painting The Romans of the Decadence, was the cynosure of the 1847 Salon, scandalising the public and the critics alike. Clésinger produced a suggestive image of a naked woman writhing from the pain of a bite inflicted by the symbolic snake twisted around her wrist. As the dimpled flesh at the top of her thighs reveals, he used a plaster cast moulded from life. His model was Baudelaire's muse, Apollonie Sabatier (1822-1890), a Parisian beauty who held a salon in Paris and was familiarly known as "La Présidente"; in lending her body to Clésinger she brought him unhoped-for success. Read more here: https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/artworks/femme-piquee-par-un-serpent-5980