Nymph with a Scorpion (plaster model)

In 1833 Prince Charles de Beauvau-Craon ordered a marble nymph from Bartolini for his château at Haroué in Lorraine. The plaster was standing in the studio by 1837, yet the finished marble reached the Paris Salon only in 1845, 12 years after the order. The subject is small and exact. A naked young nymph has just been stung by a scorpion, and she turns her foot to look at the wound, her face tightening into a slight grimace of pain. One of the critics walking that Salon was the 24-year-old Charles Baudelaire, who picked out this marble as the principal piece of sculpture in the show and wrote that it was impossible to refuse admiration to the foreign artist. The simplified face and hair look back to 15th-century Florentine carvers such as Desiderio da Settignano. The prince's marble is now in the Louvre. A second full-size marble was ordered for Russia in 1846 and is in the Hermitage, and two smaller versions are at Chantilly and in a private collection.