The Venus de' Medici or Medici Venus is a lifesize Hellenistic marble sculpture depicting the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite. It is a 1st century BC marble copy, perhaps made in Athens, of a bronze original Greek sculpture, following the type of the Aphrodite of Cnidos, which would have been made by a sculptor in the immediate Praxitelean tradition, perhaps at the end of the century. It has become one of the navigation points by which the progress of the Western classical tradition is traced, the references to it an outline of the changes of taste and the process of classical scholarship. It is housed in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy.
Read more about Venus De' Medici: Origin, Discovery and Display, The Metropolitan Museum's Aphrodite, Modern Copies
Famous quotes containing the words venus and/or medici:
“Yet have I fierce affections, and think
What Venus did with Mars.”
—William Shakespeare (15641616)
“I should like to have seen a gallery of coronation beauties, at Westminster Abbey, confronted for a moment by this band of Island girls; their stiffness, formality, and affectation contrasted with the artless vivacity and unconcealed natural graces of these savage maidens. It would be the Venus de Medici placed beside a milliners doll.”
—Herman Melville (18191891)