The Colonna Venus is a Roman marble copy of the lost

Aphrodite of Cnidus The Aphrodite of Knidos (or Cnidus) was an Ancient Greek sculpture of the goddess Aphrodite created by Praxiteles of Athens around the 4th century BC. It was one of the first life-sized representations of the nude female form in Greek history, d ...

sculpture by

Praxiteles Praxiteles (; ) of Athens, the son of Cephisodotus the Elder, was the most renowned of the Attic sculptors of the 4th century BC. He was the first to sculpt the nude female form in a life-size statue. While no indubitably attributable sculpture ...

, conserved in the

Museo Pio-Clementino The Vatican Museums (; ) are the public museums of the Vatican City. They display works from the immense collection amassed by the Catholic Church and the papacy throughout the centuries, including several of the best-known Roman sculptures and ...

as a part of the

Vatican Museums The Vatican Museums (; ) are the public museums of the Vatican City. They display works from the immense collection amassed by the Catholic Church and the papacy throughout the centuries, including several of the best-known Roman sculptures and ...

' collections. It is now the best-known and perhaps most faithful Roman copy of Praxiteles's original. The Colonna

Venus Venus is the second planet from the Sun. It is often called Earth's "twin" or "sister" planet for having almost the same size and mass, and the closest orbit to Earth's. While both are rocky planets, Venus has an atmosphere much thicker ...

is one of four marble Venuses presented in 1783 to

Pope Pius VI Pope Pius VI (; born Count Angelo Onofrio Melchiorre Natale Giovanni Antonio called Giovanni Angelo or Giannangelo Braschi, 25 December 171729 August 1799) was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 15 February 1775 to hi ...

by Filippo Giuseppe Colonna; this, the best of them, was published in

Ennio Quirino Visconti Ennio Quirino Visconti (November 1, 1751 – February 7, 1818) was a Roman politician, antiquarian, and art historian, papal Prefect of Antiquities, and the leading expert of his day in the field of ancient Roman sculpture. His son, Pietro Ercole ...

's catalogue of the

, where it was identified for the first time as a copy of the Cnidian Venus. Immediately it eclipsed the somewhat flaccid variant of the same model that, as the ''Belvedere Venus'', had long been in the Vatican collections. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, a prudish tin drape was modestly wrapped around the legs of the Colonna statue this was removed in 1932, when the statue was removed to the ''Gabinetto delle Maschere'' where it can be seen today. When Christian Blinkenberg wrote the first modern monograph of the Cnidian Aphrodite in 1933, he found the Colonna Aphrodite and the Belvedere Aphrodite to most accurately reflect the original, mediated through a

Hellenistic In classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Greek history after Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BC, which was followed by the ascendancy of the R ...

copy.

Notes

References

Sources

Gallery

Image:Colonna-Venus-front.jpg, The Colonna Venus Image:Colonna-Venus-right-side.jpg, Colonna Venus: right side view Image:Knidiska_Afrodite,_Nordisk_familjebok.png, The Colonna Venus with its tin draperies, as it was displayed until 1932. Sculptures in the Vatican Museums Cnidian Venuses Roman copies of 4th-century BC Greek sculptures {{VaticanCity-sculpture-stub