Modern Copies
The Medici Venus is one of the most-copied antiquities. Louis XIV had no less than five, marbles by Carlier, Clérion, Coysevox and Frémery, and a bronze by the Keller brothers. (Haskell and Penny, p. 325). In lead, copies of the Venus de' Medici stand in many English and European gardens, sometimes protected by small temples; in small bronze reductions it figured among the most familiar of the antiquities represented in collectors' cabinets: in Greuze's portrait of Claude-Henri Watelet, ca 1763-65, the connoisseur and author of L'Art de peindre is shown with calipers and a notebook, regarding a bronze statuette of the Venus de' Medici, as if in the act of deducing the ideal proportions of the female figure from the sculpture's example. The Venus de' Medici was even reproduced in Sèvres biscuit porcelain, which had the matte whiteness of marble.
American sculptor Hiram Powers based his 1844 statue The Greek Slave on the Venus de' Medici.
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