Esquiline Venus

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Esquiline Venus
ArtistAnon.
Yearc. 50 AD
TypeWhite marble
LocationCapitoline Museums[1], Rome

The Esquiline Venus, depicting the goddess

Cleopatra VII
.

The sculpture is thought to have been based on an original Hellenistic statue from the

asp or uraeus, depictions of the Egyptian cobra.[3]

History

The Esquiline Venus was found in 1874 in Piazza Dante on the

Italian unification.[5] The newly found sculpture soon passed into the collection of the Capitoline Museums,[6] where it now resides, and is usually on display at its Museo Centrale Montemartini.[7]

In style the Esquiline Venus is an example of the

Hellenistic sculptures.[8] Its arms must have broken off when the statue fell after the imperial park in which it stood fell into neglect after antiquity. They have been frequently restored in paintings (see below
), but never in reality.

Subject

A Sculptor's Model, by Alma-Tadema, 1877

The statue's subject has variously been interpreted, as the Roman goddess

Tarsos in 42 BC.[13]

In modern art

"Diadumene", by Poynter

The sculpture inspired many artistic reconstructions in the decade after its discovery. Chief among these are

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's A Sculptor's Model (1877) and Edward Poynter's Diadumene (1884).[14] These both portrayed the statue's model binding her hair with a strip of fabric (as with the statue type diadumenos
) in preparation for modelling for the sculptor or for taking a bath respectively. Poynter believed this to be the correct reconstruction partly because the remains of the little finger of her left hand are visible on the back of her head, suggesting that her left arm was raised to hold her hair in place, whilst the right hand wound the fabric. At the Museo Centrale Montemartini, the Esquiline Venus is now usually displayed behind a 'pool' (actually a glass floor panel) in tribute to this rendering.

Another torso of this type (Louvre)[15]

Exhibitions

From December 2006 to February 4, 2007, the sculpture was the centrepiece of the exhibition "Cleopatra and the Caesars" at the

Louvre for the Praxiteles
exhibition.

Notes

  1. ^
    ISBN 9780195365535
    , p. 175.
  2. ^ For bibliography on this point, see here.
  3. ^ For bibliography on this point, see here.
  4. ^ "The identification is attractive, but not certain, according to Lawrence Richardson, A new Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome, s.v. "Horti Lamiani".
  5. Boxer of Quirinal
    was discovered in similar circumstances in 1885.
  6. ^ Accession number: inv. MC1141
  7. ^ "Musei Capitolini: Museo Montemartini". Archived from the original on 2006-12-06. Retrieved 2006-12-03.
  8. ^ Robinson: "the Esquiline Venus is an anomalous work, for while the body is modelled with a voluptuousness that almost oversteps the line dividing the nude from the naked, the head is treated with archaic severity, in the style of the first half of the fifth century", quoted in Edmund von Mach, A Handbook of Greek and Roman Sculpture 1905, plate 318 and p 348f.
  9. ^ For bibliography on this point, see here.
  10. ^
    ISBN 978-1-44119-065-9
    , pp. 186, 194 footnote #10.
  11. ISBN 978-1-4051-1390-8
    , p. 83.
  12. ISBN 9780060585587
    .
  13. ISBN 9780313325274
    .
  14. ^ Poynter worked from the cast of the original in the Sculpture Court of the Victoria and Albert Museum, according to the reviewer in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, "The Decline of Art: the Royal Academy and Grosvenor Gallery", July 1885, in an extended justification of nudity in art: "Slightly, however, he has seen fit to modify the head: archaic curls are relaxed into flowing locks, and severe features relent into society smiles" (p. 13).
  15. ^ Later, 2nd century Parian marble torso of this type, from Brindisi [1]
  16. ^ "Bucerius Kunst Forum". Archived from the original on 2007-05-10. Retrieved 2006-12-05.

References

Cleopatra?

  • Das Gesicht der Göttin., 16.10.2006, Der Spiegel. Hamburg 2006, 42, S. 181
  • Berthold Seewald, So sah Kleopatra wirklich aus, Die Welt, 26 October 2006 (in German)[2]
  • Bernard Andreae, Dorothea Gall, Günter Grimm, Heinz Heinen et al., "Kleopatra und die Caesaren", hrsg. von Ortrud Westheider, Karsten Müller (2006: Munich, Hirmer Verlag)
  • Cleo Uncovered (exhibition review of "Cleopatra and the Caesars"), Current World Archaeology 20, pages 42–43

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Esquiline Venus.
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