Liberty Leading the People

Liberty is the only fictional figure in the painting; the boy with two pistols, the man in the bowler hat, the workman in white are realistic Parisians from the July Revolution of 1830. Delacroix painted Liberty as a real revolutionary, not a clean classical goddess. She has dark armpit hair, visible under her raised left arm, and dirty feet. Her exposed breasts caused most of the 19th-century scandal; the body hair was noted with quieter shock by classically trained critics. Now at Musée du Louvre, Paris @museelouvre