Portrait of Marie Louise of Austria

In 1810 the French sculptor François Joseph Bosio went to Compiègne to portray the Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte and his second wife Marie Louise. The two busts were exhibited at the Salon in the same year and achieved a great success. For this reason, they were later used as the official image of the couple and such was their success, that Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi, Gran Duchess of Tuscany and sister of Napoleon, commissioned several marble copies starting from plaster casts of Bosio's work. Lorenzo Bartolini was the artist put in charge of reproducing the prototypes in marble versions of different sizes in order to facilitate the portrait diffusion. Bartolini signed this bust, whose refined lavoration of the marble bears witness to the artist's qualities. The sculptor managed to portray an original and less idealised image of Marie Louise substituting the ancient tunic with a modern dress in Empire style.