Venus De' Medici

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:

    Knaves and fools
    have done you impious wrong,
    Venus, for venery stands for impurity
    and Venus as desire
    is venereous, lascivious.
    Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)

    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 milliner’s doll.
    Herman Melville (1819–1891)