Monument to Elisa Baciocchi by Lorenzo Bartolini at the Accademia Gallery of Florence

Thanks to a prolonged stay in Paris as a young man, Bariolini worked on important commissions for Napoleon and his family. In Tuscany, Elisa Bejiki, 1777-1820, was one of his greatest admirers. In addition to official portraits for her and her closest relatives, in 1808 he began working on a major, and ill-fated, monument to the Emperor's sister, probably intended You see, it periodically fell to each professor of the academia to pose the nude model for the life classes. Typically this involved a professor meticulously posing a model in the exact pose of a known classical work, you know, of an Apollo, or a Mars, or a Minerva. And the first time it was Lorenzo Bartolini's turn to pose the model, he made a point of posing the model in front of all the students so that they could understand his methods. He had the model get up on the modeling stand, and when the model turned around to ask Bartolini how to pose, before he could finish his turn, Bartolini called out for the model to freeze in position, mid-turn. The entire class, along with the custodian of the model room, all burst into laughter at what they all regarded as a ridiculous way to pose a model, and the students refused to attend the lesson. Lorenzo Bartolini, an Italian sculptor, was born on January 7, 1777, in Vernio, Italy. He lived until the age of 73 and passed away on January 20, 1850. Bartolini was a neoclassical artist who incorporated elements of sentimental piety and naturalistic detail into his works.