This sculpture sparked one of the century’s biggest art scandals.
Auguste Clésinger’s Woman Bitten by a Serpent blew up the 1847 Salon. People were convinced he cast it from a real woman’s body, which, in Paris at that time, was basically a moral earthquake.
The model was Apollonie Sabatier, a well‑known courtesan and muse, already surrounded by gossip.
Critics hated how raw the piece looked: too real, too physical, too sensual, too much of everything.
They freaked out over the cellulite, the muscle tension, the natural folds... details no one expected to see in sculpture.