A Marble Figure of Aphrodite , Roman Imperial, circa late 1st/early 2nd Century A.D.

of Capitoline type, after a late Hellenistic work ultimately inspired by the Aphrodite of Knidos, the goddess standing on an oval base with the weight on her left leg, the support in the form of Eros riding a dolphin atop a rocky outcrop, the young god grasping the dorsal fin with his left hand, his hair arranged in a braid across the crown of the head.

Mr. Brunet, Paris, 1830s
acquired by the current owner in the 1950s from a gallery on Park Avenue in New York City

Comte Frédéric de Clarac, Musée de sculpture antique et moderne, tome IV, Paris, 1836-1837, pl. 620, no. 1380
J.J. Bernoulli, Aphrodite. Ein Baustein zur griechischen Kunstmythologie, Leipzig, 1873, p. 231, no. 4
Salomon Reinach, Répertoire de la sculpture grecque et romaine, vol. I, Paris, 1897, p. 332, no. 6
Bianca Maria Felletti Maj, “Afrodite pudica,” in Archeologia Classica, vol. 3, 1951, p. 64, no. 59

The present figure was first recorded in the collection of a Mr. Brunet in Paris sometime in the 1830s. Among the Brunets most likely to have owned such an antique were barons Vivant-Jean Brunet(-Denon), 1778-1866, and Dominique-Vivant Brunet (-Denon), d. circa 1845, both nephews of the famous baron Dominique Vivant-Denon (1747-1825), art advisor to Napoleon and Director of the Imperial Museums. After inheriting their uncle’s art collection, including mostly small-scale Egyptian and classical antiquities, his nephews had it published in Paris in 1826 in a small catalogue by L.J.J. Dubois et al. entitled Description des objets d’art qui composent le cabinet de feu M. le baron V. Denon, and in 1829 in several lavishly illustrated volumes entitled Monuments des arts du dessin. In 1846 an estate sale catalogue of “the late Baron Brunet-Denon” listed several objects which appear to come from Vivant-Denon’s collection. Unfortunately, none of these documents mentions a marble Aphrodite. As Curator of Antiquities at the Musée Royal from 1818 on, the Comte de Clarac (1777-1847) is likely to have come into contact with either or both of Vivant-Denon's heirs.

Felletii Maj (op. cit., p. 64) categorizes the present sculpture as a Roman copy of the Capitoline Aphrodite, a bronze statue created in the late Hellenistic period and named in modern times after its best known Roman version now in the Capitoline Museum in Rome (Bieber, Sculpture of the Hellenistic Age, figs. 34-35; Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, no. 84, fig. 169); uItimately inspired by the Aphrodite of Knidos the Hellenistic creation shows theatrical elements typical of the time of its creation: the goddess has divested herself of her clothes to take a bath and, suddenly meeting the gaze of an unknown onlooker, covers herself in a charming yet ineffectual gesture.

The Hellenistic bronze known as the Capitoline Aphrodite could stand by itself and did not need any support, be it in the shape of a vase, a pillar, a tree trunk, a dolphin, or an Eros riding a dolphin, which sculptors of the Roman period had to add to their marble copies because of their chosen material's lesser tensile strength; in other words the form of the support seems to have had little or no relation to the type of Aphrodite the Romans chose to copy, whether Capitoline or Medici (see C.M. Havelock, The Aphrodite of Knidos and her successors: A Historical Review of the Female Nude in Greek Art, Ann Arbor, 1995, p. 75). As secondary as it was, however, the dolphin, served as a significant and highly symbolic addition to the figure; as an attribute of Aphrodite it recalls her birth from the sea off the city of Paphos on the Island of Cyprus, a scene famously depicted in Sandro Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.”

At the time the drawing was executed to be included as an engraving in Clarac's Musée de Sculpture (see p. ... in this catalogue) the statue still a head, the same one sold at Sotheby’s, New York, December 11th, 2002, no. 12 (acquired from J.J. Klejman, New York, in 1964). The head was joined to the torso with a lead clamp and the neck was stippled/roughened to enhance adhesion of some additional bonding material; this type of surface preparation and joining technique indicates a much earlier intervention than an 18th/19th century restoration, such as the new right foot of the Eros, which is attached using an iron dowel. With its symmetrical locks of hair curling up over the diadem the head is consistent with the type of the Capitoline Aphrodite, is of the same crystalline grain as the body, turned slightly to the left as is what remains of the neck on the torso, and carved in much the same style as the head of Eros, suggesting that it is the statue's original head, which would have been repaired either in antiquity or in the Renaissance. The now missing right arm, on the other hand, is likely to have been new altogether, since it terminated in an armband intended to hide the join. As is the case in most drawings in the Musée de sculpture the artist hired by Clarac did not attempt to render the statue base beyond its basic form, even though, in this particular case, the base is clearly original to the work.