As her oyster shudders open, the pearl, gleaming white in a skin-tight body suit, rises reluctantly. She remains curled asleep on the half-shell for a beat too long before propping herself up on one arm. Heaving an immense eye roll, she stands to assume an ambiguous contrapposto: is it demure, or half-hearted? Birth of the Pearl, an installment of filmmaker Frederick S. Armitage’s “Living Picture” series, is a clear homage to The Birth of Venus. But it’s not an exact reproduction. Pouting under a halo of dark curls, Armitage’s pearl reads less as Boticcelli’s golden-haired goddess and more as her petulant younger sister.

Filmed on the rooftop of the Biograph Company’s New York City studio, the short film plays with a vaudeville theater staple: “living picture” shows in which models recreated famous works of art on the stage, often nude. The performances were racier iterations of the nineteenth century’s tableau vivant fad, when reenactments were staged everywhere from the parlor to parades. As the curtain parted, the performers held perfectly still amid carefully constructed sets. After it closed, they rushed to reposition themselves for the next staging.

Burlesque is all about the reveal: in living-picture performances, the striptease is replaced with the anticipation of closed curtains. In Birth of the Pearl, there are not one but two reveals. First, the curtains are drawn open by a pair of armored attendants. Then, the prop bivalve’s slow unsealing. Why, then, with twice the tease, is Birth of the Pearl strangely sexless?

Perhaps it is her lack of enthusiasm. Bleary-eyed, the pearl rubs her brow with one hand. Then, just as reluctantly, she dutifully poses: arms held behind her, glancing down. Perhaps it is her shamelessness. She makes no effort, as Botticelli’s Venus Anadyomene coyly does, to cover herself (or rather, her unitard) with hand or hair.

But what Birth of the Pearl lacks in energy, it makes up for in a lackadaisical kind of naturalism. It may be that this particular form of burlesque has lost its power to provoke over the interceding century: eroticism can be distinctly dated. But whether it reads more as modesty or more like teenage moodiness, what hasn’t been lost are the universal, immortal gestures of someone woken before they were ready to face the day.