Phryne

Phryne was a hetaira in Athens in the 4th century BC, a courtesan at the top of the trade, and she is said to have modelled for the sculptor Praxiteles. The story that made her a favourite subject for French painters comes from Athenaeus, a Greek writer working roughly five centuries after her lifetime. Put on trial for impiety, she was saved, he reports, when her defender, the orator Hypereides, pulled her robe open in front of the jury, and the judges acquitted her. Historians treat the episode as doubtful. Boulanger painted her in Rome in 1850, in his first years there as a Prix de Rome student. Eleven years later the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme's version of the same trial packed the Paris Salon of 1861.