Whether it’s building business empires or their personal compounds, the 1% likes to take things to another level. Ordinary wife guys can post photos of their partners to Instagram and call it a day, but married moguls have the means to go beyond social media posts in favor of commissioning blue-chip art of their beloveds (which they maybe then post about anyway). In August, Mark Zuckerberg shared an Instagram post of his wife, Priscilla Chan, sipping her morning coffee beside a seven-foot-tall sculpture of herself by contemporary artist Daniel Arsham. The scene in a Social Network sequel practically writes itself: “A photo of your wife isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A giant sculpture of your wife.”
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The Meta founder isn’t the only CEO to have their spouse immortalized by a famed artist. “Historically, wealthy people have commissioned portraits or, more rarely, sculptures of themselves to gain status and, of course, to immortalize themselves,” says Olav Velthuis, a sociology professor at the University of Amsterdam, explaining that the custom has become rarer with the advent of photography. Industrialist and art collector Peter Brant commissioned Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan to craft a portrait of his wife, supermodel Stephanie Seymour. The resulting work—titled Stephanie (2003), but better known as “Trophy Wife”—depicts Seymour sans clothes (and legs) as a ship figurehead. “We thought it was an interesting idea,” Brant told AD in 2020.
Last year, Jeff Bezos’s summer of superyacht fun (aboard a $500 million luxury vessel dubbed Koru) became the object of tabloid obsession for perceived similarities between the ship’s wooden figurehead and Bezos’s fiancée, Lauren Sánchez—or, as the Daily Mail so tamely put it, “Curvaceous winged GODDESS on Jeff Bezos’s 416-footer bears striking resemblance to none other than…Ms. Sanchez!” Sánchez herself later told Vogue that the sculpture is actually of Freyja, the Norse goddess of love—and implied that if it were of her, it would sport larger breasts.
While Bezos’s decorative decision was perhaps not intentionally a nod to his partner, Zuckerberg’s was direct. Besides love and affection for his wife, the tech tycoon seems to have been inspired by history. “Bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife,” he wrote in the post’s caption. However, sources tell us, Zuck is not exactly doing as the Romans did. “It is a bit misleading to say the Romans made sculptures of their wives,” says Dr. Glenys Davies, honorary fellow in Classics at the University of Edinburgh. “Some may have done, but there is little evidence of it being a common practice.”