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, …