Voltaire Naked
Jean-Baptiste Pigalle (1714-1785) · 1776
An old man sits completely naked, his skin loose over the bones, his face alert and sardonic. He is Voltaire, the most famous writer in Europe, portrayed at seventy-six not as a Roman hero in a toga but as a body that has aged. Pigalle insisted on the nude because the ancients had honoured their great men that way, and he studied the writer's face from life at Ferney in 1770 while using an old soldier as the model for the body. The inscription on the plinth records the gift: to Monsieur de Voltaire, by the men of letters, his compatriots and contemporaries, 1776. Look for the sculptor's signature on the foot of the lyre behind the figure.
The statue was commissioned on 17 April 1770 by a subscription of seventeen philosophers gathered at the salon of Suzanne Necker, and the marble was finished in 1776. The nudity shocked Paris, and Voltaire himself joked about it. The statue went to his great-nephew and stood in the dining room of the chateau of Hornoy before being given to the Institut de France in 1807. The Institut deposited it at the Louvre in 1962 in exchange for the mausoleum of Mazarin.
Did You Know? The sculptor borrowed the body of an old soldier to stand in for the philosopher, who was too frail and too amused to pose naked himself.
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