Venus De' Medici - Discovery and Display

Discovery and Display

The origin of the Venus is undocumented: "its reputation seems to have grown up gradually," Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny remarked. It was published in the collection at the Villa Medici, Rome, in 1638, given three plates in the anthology of the most noble sculptures that the ravages of time had spared in Rome compiled by François Perrier, Segmenta nobilia signorum et statuarum que temporis dentem invidium evase, Rome 1638. The Venus was already known by 1559, it now appears, for a bronze reduction of it was among the series of the most famous Roman sculptures that were featured on a cabinet completed in that year; it was commissioned by Nicolò Orsini, conte di Pitigliano, as a gift to Philip II of Spain: the sculptures were by the Dutch sculptor trained in Benvenuto Cellini's atelier, Willem van Tetrode, called Guglielmo Fiammingo in Italy.

Though visitors to Rome like John Evelyn found it "a miracle of art", it was sent to Florence in August 1677, its export permitted by Innocent XI, it was thought, because it stimulated lewd behavior. In the Tribuna of the Uffizi it was a high point of the Grand Tour and was universally esteemed as one of the half-dozen finest antique statues to have survived, until a reaction in taste began to set in during the 19th century, in the form of a few dissenting voices (Haskell and Penny p. 325). Luca Giordano made hundreds of drawings of it, Samuel Rogers made daily appointments with it, Zoffany included it in his 1778 Tribuna of the Uffizi, and Lord Byron devoted five stanzas of Childe Harold to describing it. It was one of the precious works of art shipped to Palermo in 1800 to escape the rapacious French, to no avail: such diplomatic pressure was brought to bear that the Vénus de Medicis was shipped to Paris in 1803. After Napoleon's fall it arrived back in Florence 27 December 1815.