The Venus de' Medici
Unknown
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
c. 1820 - 1880
Materials
Bronze, Stone
Measurements
470 mm (Height); 95 mm (Diameter)
Place of origin
Florence
Collection
The Argory, County Armagh
NT 565229
Summary
Sculpture, bronze; the Venus de’Medici; Italian, probably Florentine; c. 1820-1880. A bronze reduction of the classical statue known as the Medici Venus or the Venus de’Medici, in the Uffizi Galleries in Florence. It became one of the most celebrated and copied Classical statues of modern times, especially during the 18th century.
Full description
A bronze statuette, a reduction of the celebrated antique statue known as the Venus de’ Medici. Standing figure of the goddess of love, Venus, right leg slightly raised, head turned to her left, her hands covering her breasts and pudenda in a gesture of modesty. The right and left arms are separately cast. An integral circular base, out of which rises a tree trunk behind Venus’s left leg. A white marble socle. The Venus de’ Medici was one of the most celebrated and copied Classical statues of modern times, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Haskell and Penny 1981, no. 88). The statue was first recorded for certain in 1638, at the Villa Medici in Rome, when engravings of three views of the sculpture were published by François Perrier, but it seems already to have in Roman collections by the middle of the sixteenth century, and may be recorded in an inventory of the Villa Medici made in 1598, although this is not certain. The Venus de’ Medici was sent to Florence in 1677 and by 1688 was on display in the Tribuna of the Uffizi, where it remains to this day. The sculpture is nowadays regarded by most scholars as a Greek copy, from the first century BC, of a bronze original, derived from a statue by the celebrated 4th-century B.C. Greek sculptor Praxiteles, known as the Venus of Cnidos. The Cnidian Venus was the forerunner of a type of statue of Venus in which the goddess modestly tries to conceal her private parts. The Venus de’ Medici has been copied innumerable times, in marble and in the form of small bronze reductions. There are numerous other copies in National Trust collections, for example in bronze at Belton House (NT 435365), Petworth (NT 485297) or Stourhead (NT 731852). One of the earliest examples in bronze to survive is the small cast in the Wallace Collection, London (Inv. S92; Warren 2016, no. 88), probably made in Rome in the workshop of Guglielmo della Porta (c. 1515-1577). It shows the sculpture before its restoration, which took place probably towards the end of the 16th century, perhaps c. 1584. Other later copies depict it in the restored state first documented in Perrier’s 1638 engravings, in which the figure is seen with her right hand fully covering her left breast. The Argory version of the Venus de’ Medici follows the statue in the Uffizi fairly closely, except that it omits the dolphin ridden by Cupid that is attached to the tree trunk and Venus’s left leg in the original statue. Whilst most of the bronze reductions after antique models at the Argory are competently cast and finished, this is not the case with this statuette, which is a very poor cast, the tree hardly modelled and Venus’s hair left unworked. It is not possible to know whether it is a cast that for some reason was left unfinished, or whether it was offered for sale in this state in some tourist shop. Jeremy Warren September 2022
Provenance
By descent; Walter McGeough Bond (1908-86), by whom given to the National Trust in 1979.
Makers and roles
Unknown, founder
References
Haskell and Penny 1981: Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique, The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500 - 1900, New Haven and London, 1981 Warren 2016: Jeremy Warren, The Wallace Collection. Catalogue of Italian Sculpture, 2 vols., London 2016