Venus of Arles
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The Venus of Arles is a 1.94m high sculpture of Venus at the Musée du Louvre.[1] It is in Hymettus marble and dates to the end of the first century BC.
It may be a copy of the Aphrodite of Thespiae by Praxiteles,[2] ordered by the courtesan Phryne. In the second century AD, Pausanias[3] mentioned the existence at Thespiae in Boeotia (central Greece) of a group made up of Cupid, Phryne and Aphrodite. The Praxitelean style may be detected in the head's resemblance to that of the Cnidian Aphrodite (definitely a work of Praxiteles). In a tentative attempt to reconstruct his career, the original Aphrodite of Thespiae would be a work from his youth (in the 360s BC), if we choose to believe that this partially-draped female (frequently repeated in the Hellenistic era - the Venus de Milo, for example - is a prelude to the fully-naked nude that was his c. 350 BC Cnidian Aphrodite.
The Venus of Arles was discovered in several pieces at the Roman theatre at Arles in 1651, by workmen who were digging a well. The head appeared first, at a depth of six feet, which spurred further excavations. Later, after it had been given in 1681 to Louis XIV to decorate the Galerie des Glaces of Versailles, further excavations were made in the area, but no further fragments were found. In his restoration of the sculpture the royal sculptor François Girardon, to make the sculpture more definitely a Venus, added some attributes: the apple in the right hand, as won in the Judgement of Paris - and the mirror in the left.[4] The head, though its broken edges do not directly join with the torso, belongs surely with the body, an important point, since it is the only sculpture of this iconographical style that retains its ghead, and the head is Praxitelean, comparable to his Aphrodite of Cnidus.[5] The bracelet on her left arm, however, is original, an identifyer of the goddess as seen on the Cnidian Aphrodite. The statue was seized upon the Revolution and has been at the Louvre ever since, though it is not at present on display.
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[edit] Notes
- ^ Theoi.com
- ^ The attribution, as a youthful work of Praxiteles, was advanced by Adolf Furtwängler, ''Meisterwerke der Griechischen Plastik (Berlin), 1893.
- ^ Pausanias, Description of Greece IX.27.5.
- ^ The discovery in 1911 of a cast made of the sculpture as it had been restored enough to reassemble demonstrated the extent of Girardon's transformative restaurations, which included refinishing the sculpture, slimming the figure in the process. That the result is as much Girardon as Roman keeps the sculpture in the storerooms of the Louvre. See Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, "The Aphrodite of Arles" American Journal of Archaeology 80.2 (Spring 1976, pp. 147-154) p 147.
- ^ Ridgway 1976:147.
