Crouching Venus
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Crouching Venus is a Hellenistic model of Venus surprised at her bath. Venus crouches with her right knee close to the ground, turns her head to the right and, in most versions, reaches her right arm over to her left shoulder to cover her breasts.
Appreciation in the Renaissance
The early interpretation of the figure, as Venus at her birth, about to be carried ashore — a type of Venus Anadyomene — encouraged the restoration of a shell upon which she crouches, in which form the Medici sculpture was engraved by Paolo Alessandro Maffei, Raccolta di statue antiche e moderni..., 1704 (plate XXVIII)
Versions since the Renaissance
Several versions of the Crouching Venus issued from the atelier of Giambologna and his heir Antonio Susini; among examples of Susini's bronze reduction, one from the collection of Louis XIV is conserved in the Holburne Museum of Art, Bath, while another, in the collection of Prince Carl Eusebius von Liechtenstein by 1658, remains in the Liechtenstein collection, Vienna.
- A famous variant in marble was delivered by Antoine Coysevox in 1686 for the Château de Marly; Coysevox, who set his Venus on a tortoise rather than a shell, was so exultant in his success that he inscribed the name of Phidias in Greek as well as his own. The sculpture pleased the king to the extent that a bronze version was cast. Today the Marly marble is at the Musée du Louvre and the Marly bronze is at the Château de Versailles.
- At Caserta Palace, the would-be Versailles outside Naples, a marble copy by Tomasso Solari was provided for the vast gardens in 1762 (Haskell and Penny 1981:323).
- Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's Crouching Flora (ca 1873), in the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, reinterprets the familiar pose.
