Venus de' Medici

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The Venus de' Medici or Medici Venus is a lifesize^[1] Hellenistic marble sculpture depicting Aphrodite. It is a first century BCE marble copy, perhaps made in Athens, of a bronze original Greek sculpture, following the type of the Aphrodite of Cnidos,^[2] which would have been made by a sculptor in the immediate Praxitelean tradition, perhaps at the end of the century. It has become one of the navigation points by which the progress of the Western classical tradition is traced, the references to it an outline of the changes of taste and the process of classical scholarship.^[3]

The goddess is depicted in a fugitive, momentary pose, as if surpised in the act of emerging from the sea, to which the dolphin at her feet alludes. The dolphin would not have been a necessary support for the bronze original.

It bears a Greek inscription CLEOMENES SON OF APOLLODORUS OF ATHENS on its base. The inscription is not original, but in the eighteenth century the name "Cleomenes" was forged on sculptures of modest quality to enhance their value, while the inscription on the Venus de' Medici was doubted in order to ascribe the work to one of various highly-thought-of names: besides Praxiteles the less-likely names of Phidias or Scopas.^[4] The restorations of the arms was made by Ercole Ferrata, who gave them long tapering Mannerist fingers that did not begin to be recognized as out of keeping with the sculpture until the nineteenth century.

The Venus de' Medici is the name piece under which are recognized many replicas and fragments of this particular version of Praxiteles' theme, which introduced the lifesize nude representation of Aphrodite. Though this particular variant is not identifiable in any extant literature, it must have been widely known to Greek and Roman connoisseurs. Among replicas and fragments of less importance,^[5] the closest in character and finest in quality is a marble Aphrodite at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, described below.

Such sculptures are described as "Roman copies", with the understanding that these were produced, often by Greek sculptors, anywhere under Roman hegemony "say, between the dictatorship of Sulla and the removal of the Capital to Constantinople, 81 B.C. to A.D. 330"^[6] Their quality may vary from work produced by a fine sculptor for a discerning patron, to commonplace copies masss-produced for gardens.

Contents 1 Discovery and display 2 The Metropolitan Museum's Aphrodite 2.1 Modern copies 3 Notes 4 References

[edit] Discovery and display

The origin of the Venus is undocumented: "its reputation seems to have grown up gradually," Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny have remarked. It was in the Villa Medici, Rome, by 1638 for certain,^[7] and possibly a generation earlier.

Though visitors to Rome like John Evelyn found it "a miracle of art", it was sent to Florence in August 1677, its export permitted by Innocent XI, it was thought, because it stimulated lewd behavior. In the Tribuna of the Uffizi it was a high point of the Grand Tour and was universally esteemed as one of the half-dozen finest antique statues to have survived, until a reaction in taste began to set in during the nineteenth century, in the form of a few dissenting voices (Haskell and Penny p. 325).^[8] Luca Giordano made hundreds of drawings of it, Samuel Rogers made daily appointments with it and Lord Byron devoted five stanzas of Childe Harold to describing it. It was one of the precious works of art shipped to Palermo in 1800 to escape the rapacious French, to no avail: such diplomatic pressure was brought to bear that the Vénus de Medicis was shipped to Paris in 1803. After Napoleon's fall it arrived back in Florence 27 December 1815.

[edit] The Metropolitan Museum's Aphrodite

The marble Aphrodite at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,^[9] is a close replica of the Venus de' Medici.^[10]The pose of the head is not in doubt, for it did not break off when other breaks occurred, in which the arms were irrevocably lost. On the plinth is the left foot, with part of the dolphin-and-tree-trunk support, and a trace of the missing right foot, restored by a cast, for the sculpture was in two sections, which were joined by casts taken of the Venus de' Medici's lower legs. For dating the replicas, attention is focussed on the minor details of the dolphins that were added by the copyists, in which stylistic conventions come to the fore: the Metropolitan dates its Aphrodite of the Medici type to the Augustan period

The Metropolitan Aphrodite was in the collection of Count von Harbuval genammt Chamaré in Silesia,^[11] whose progenitor Count Schlabrendorf made the Grand Tour and corresponded with Johann Joachim Winckelmann.

[edit] Modern copies

The Medici Venus is one of the most-copied antiquities. Louis XIV had no less than five, marbles by Carlier, Cleron, Coysevox and Frémery and a bronze by the Keller brothers. (Haskell and Penny, p. 325). In lead, copies of the Venus de' Medici stand in many English and European gardens, sometimes protected by small temples; in small bronze reductions it figured among the most familiar of the antiquities represented in collectors' cabinets; it was even reproduced in Sèvres biscuit porcelain with the matte whiteness of marble.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (Yale University Press) 1981
• Guido Mansuelli, Galleria degli Uffizi: Le Sculture (Rome) 2 vols. 1958–61, vol. I, pp. 71–73.