L’Athlète victorieux

Francesco Hayez was 22 and far from home, a Venetian on a scholarship in Rome, when he painted this life-size nude in 1813. Antonio Canova, then the most admired artist in Europe, had set up a competition through an anonymous patron that asked simply for a full-size figure from the model, and on the 17th of May Hayez took first prize. The judges singled out the easy, natural movement of the pose. Hayez would later leave this cool classical manner behind and become the leading painter of Italian Romanticism. But in 1813 he was the promising student, and for years afterward the academy kept his athlete on hand as a model for younger artists learning to draw the human body.