Statue of Aphrodite (Louvre-Naples type) with a non-original head

Roman art

This statue of Venus, goddess of love and symbol of vitality, shows the deity standing with her weight on her left leg and brushing the ground with the tip of her right foot, which is moved back. Her right arm is raised and holding up the edge of her mantle, while her left arm is bent at a right angle and held in front of her body, holding out an object that is now lost. The figure is in a frontal pose, with her curved left hip corresponding to her lowered left shoulder. The woman is wearing a thin, transparent chiton that reveals the shape of her body and slips off her left arm to reveal her breast and shoulder.

The Julio-Claudian replica of the famous Aphrodite of the Louvre-Naples type reveals the clear influence of an archetype from the end of the fifth century BCE that can be ascribed, based on the equilibrium of the pose and the handling of the drapery, to the circle of Phidias or Polykleitos.

Object details

Commentary

In 1828, this statue of a ‘veiled Venus, similar to the other one in the Vatican Museum, with a pedestal with a historiated bas-relief’, was mentioned along with the ones in the ‘Sala della Bella Cerere’ or ‘Sala della Leda’ in the general plan for the ‘New Borghese Museum’, installed by Camillo Borghese between 1819 and 1832 in the Casino after it had been stripped by the sale of works from the collection to his brother-in-law Napoleon Bonaparte (Moreno 1997, p. 106). In an attempt to emphasise the thematic links between the sculptures in the collection, the statue was deliberately paired with a variant on the type (Gasparri 2011, p. 84). In 1832, Antonio Nibby mentioned it in ‘Camera I’, now Room I, describing it as a ‘Venus or Nymph letting her peplos fall and removing her tunic in preparation for her bath’ and set on a round altar decorated with dancing Maenads. In 1838, the same author wrote that it was still in its current location, but this time described it as a Venus Genetrix.

The figure is placing her weight on her left leg, while the right leg is bent and moved back, the tip of her foot grazing the ground. Her right arm is raised and holding up the edge of her mantle, while her left arm is bent at a right angle and held in front of her body, holding out an object that is now lost but that has been variously identified as an ewer, the edge of her mantle or an apple. Her body is wrapped in a light, sleeveless chiton with thin pleats. It is so transparent that it creates a wet drapery effect, revealing her body, and slips down along her left arm, revealing her breast and shoulder.

The sculpture is a replica of the famous Louvre-Naples type (Delivorrias et al 1984, pp. 33–35, nos 225–240), named after the first known replica, now at the Louvre (Paris, Louvre MA 525; Brinke 1996, pp. 19–20, R 3), but also known as the Louvre-Holkham Hall and the Paris-Norfolk type (Brinke 1996, pp. 24–25, R 9; Angelicoussis 2001, pp. 82–83, no. 3). The head, reconstructed from two fragments and heavily reworked, is not of the same type, although the hairstyle is that of other depictions of Venus. The prototype, which would have been bronze, was probably sculpted between 420 and 400 BCE and it is generally attributed to an artist in the circle of Phidias or Polykleitos. While past scholars put forward names of students of Phidias active at the end of the fifth century BCE, the preference has turned in recent years to Callimachus, a Argive sculptor from the Phidian school, or an artist from the Polykleitan school associated with the Parthenon worksite, based on the eclectic nature of the work, which masterfully joins Attic-style drapery with Argive equilibrium in the pose. According to another theory, it was a statue of Aphrodite repeated in the twin sanctuaries dedicated to the goddess in Athens, the source of many replicas, and Troezen, Argolis (La Rocca 1972-73, p. 440).

The type was extremely popular and reproduced in various formats for residential, funerary and public settings starting in the Hellenistic period and increasing in the Imperial period, especially the Julio-Claudian age and the period between the Hadrianic and Antonine ages (Karanastassis 1986, pp. 217–259; Brinke 1991, pp. 147–243; Brinke 1996, pp. 18–59). The spread of the type to all the cities of the empire during the early imperial period can be traced to broad interest in Venus as the mother of Aeneas and ancestress of the gens Iulia. Whereas the statue type cannot be linked, as various scholars have argued in the past, to the Venus Genetrix cult statue in the Forum of Caesar in Rome, which Pliny writes was sculpted by Arkesilaos (Naturalis Historia 35.155f), nor to the statue in the temple of Venus that replaced the original one for the Trajan reconsecration in 113 CE (Capaldi 2009, p. 64 note 26).

The monotone, almost metallic treatment of the drapery folds and stiffening of the plastic forms, echoed in the replica in the Farnese Collection in Naples (MANN inv. 5997), allow us to date the sculpture to the mid first century CE.

Jessica Clementi