Venus
- Object belonging
- One's own
- Category
- Bronze sculpture
- City
- Rome
- Location
- Museo Nazionale del Palazzo di Venezia
- Specific location
- Room 17
- Inventory
- PV 10789
- Material and technique
- Bronze, natural dark brown patina, opaque black lacquer
- Author
- attributed to Girolamo Campagna (1549-1617/1625)
- Dimensions
- 53 x 14 x 12 cm.
- Origin
- Auriti Collection (1963)
- Image copyright
- SSPSAE e per il Polo Museale della città di Roma
Short description
A version of this Venus is held in the Untermyer Collection at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The initials “IC” are engraved on the edge of the base, the letters separated by tiny decorative circles, which for a long period were thought to be the signature of Girolamo Campagna. Both the sculptures, however, seem to derive from the Medici Venus. The left arm is placed in a different position though, no longer a chaste gesture, as is the leg, resting on the dolphin. There is some doubt though over how Campagna came to know the Uffizi marble, which until 1677 was in the Villa Medici in Rome. The many versions of the Venus Marina in museums and collections all vary in the manner in which the dolphin is rendered. It is always fused on its own and added to the base in different places, with its tail modelled in different ways.
Pietro Cannata
Bibliography
A. Santangelo, Museo di Palazzo Venezia. La Collezione Auriti, Rome 1964, p.20; A. Bacchi, La bellissima maniera: Alessandro Vittoria e la scultura veneta del Cinquecento, exh. cat., Trento 1999, p. 410, no. 92.