Model of the Greek Slave

Powers, a self-taught sculptor from Vermont, settled in Florence in 1837 and finished the clay model in March 1843. The pins mark reference points for a pointing machine, a device with movable arms that let assistants transfer measurements from this plaster to a block of marble with great precision. Look at how the surface is scratched and pitted from decades of use in the studio. The subject was a Greek Christian captive being sold in an Ottoman slave market, and Powers explained the nudity as involuntary and the downcast face as evidence of her virtue, an argument that allowed Victorian audiences to look at a naked woman with a clear conscience.

The marble versions toured America in the late 1840s, drawing more than one hundred thousand viewers, and abolitionists soon pointed out that a chained white woman was being admired in a country that enslaved millions of Black people. When Powers died in 1873 his studio contents stayed in Florence, and in 1968 the Smithsonian bought the entire lot, including this model and many other plasters. They are displayed in the Luce Foundation Center, where you can see them close up among the crowded cases.

Did You Know? The hundreds of small metal pins in the plaster are measuring points that let carvers copy the figure into marble with a pointing machine.