Female Nude from Behind

A naked woman lies with her back to us, and that is all the picture shows. Around 1740, when Pierre Subleyras painted it in Rome, a nude almost always came with a reason attached, a goddess, a nymph, a figure from myth or allegory. He gives none. The museum points out that we cannot even tell whether she was a hired model, a lover or the painter's own wife. Working from a live woman was a delicate matter in papal Rome, where painters at the city's academy were supposedly forbidden to use female models at all. The canvas is long and low, 136 centimetres wide and 74 high. The museum compares its frankness with Édouard Manet's Olympia, which caused a scandal in Paris more than a century later, in 1865. The picture came to the gallery in 1963, left to it by the Marchesa Maria Rosa Gabrielli Gagliardi.