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She covers her own face. The one person in the room not looking at her is the defendant.

Phryne was the most famous courtesan in fourth-century Athens and the most famous body in Greece, because Praxiteles used her as the model for the Aphrodite of Knidos, the first life-sized female nude in Greek sculpture and an object that people took sea voyages to see. She was charged with impiety, a capital offense; the ancient accounts say the accusation involved profaning the Eleusinian mysteries, and the private history behind it was a rejected suitor. Her defense was conducted by the orator Hypereides, one of the best in Athens, who was also her lover. The speech was going badly. So, according to Athenaeus, writing some five centuries later, Hypereides brought her into the middle of the court, tore open her robe, and asked the jury of the Areopagus whether they proposed to condemn the priestess and servant of Aphrodite. They acquitted her, and the sources differ on whether the reason was religious awe or straightforward superstition about destroying something that beautiful. Some tellings have him baring only her breast. The story is late, and possibly grew in the telling; what it preserves accurately is what an Athenian court was, a large crowd of ordinary men who could be moved by a stunt. Phryne got rich enough afterward to make the offer that says the most about her. When Alexander destroyed Thebes in 335 BC, she proposed to pay for rebuilding the city walls, on one condition: an inscription reading that Alexander had knocked them down and Phryne the courtesan had put them back up. Thebes declined. Gérôme painted the scene in 1861 and turned it into the year's scandal. The jurors are packed along the right in red, 30 faces doing 30 versions of shock, one old man half rising, one covering his eyes; Hypereides holds up the blue cloak like a man completing a card trick; and Phryne, the only pale vertical in the picture, has covered her own face with her arm, which means the one person in the room not looking at her is her. Critics accused Gérôme of selling a nude with a classical alibi. The painting is in Hamburg, and the alibi has held up for 160 years.