ITALIAN, 19TH CENTURY, AFTER THE ANTIQUE | CROUCHING VENUS

A nineteenth century English tourist in Florence wrote that of all the Venuses in the Uffizi, ‘a pretty little crouching Venus alone caught my fancy’. Considered to represent either the Goddess after birth or emerging from her bath, the Crouching Venus was a type highly esteemed by Grand Tourists, whose demand for high quality copies produced a number of variations on the theme.

The most famous copy was executed by Coysevox in 1686 for Versailles, but the Crouching Venus has been reproduced repeatedly in an array of mediums; Paul Cézanne, for example, frequently drew the Louvre’s Aphrodite Accroupie (inv. no. Ma2240), and adapted it for his version of Les Grandes Baigneuses. The present marble, with twisted torso and one arm reaching over her head appears to follow most closely a Roman copy in the Louvre (inv. no. MA 53).

RELATED LITERATURE

F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500-1900, New Haven and London, 1981, pp. 321-323, no 86