Venus

This statuette is a reduced version of the famous Venus de’ Medici, the ancient marble unearthed in Rome in the 1630s and transferred to Florence in 1677 for installation in the Tribuna of the Uffizi along with other notable sculptures and paintings.[1] The composition circulated in bronze reductions during the eighteenth century, its popularity owing much to replications by Massimiliano Soldani, and it is not surprising that our figure has at times been linked to him. In addition to original compositions (see cat. 145), Soldani was known for bronze versions of notable sculptures, both antique and “old master,” of which now at least twenty different models have been documented.[2] He produced at least three large-scale bronze Venus de’ Medicis, and several statutettes of the subject have been associated with him.[3] Soldani achieved a soft, fleshy corporeality in bronze absent from his marble output, and his bronze versions after the antique are animated by deft personal touches. Lacking such flourishes, our Venus must be considered a derivative cast. The omission of the small cupid playing atop the dolphin at Venus’s left, present on all the known Soldani Venus de’ Medici casts, also signals a more generic manufacture. The inexpert modeling, graceless pose, and disproportionate limbs point to a run-of-the-mill production for Grand Tour visitors, one that nonetheless reflects the vogue for reductions of antique statuary and their reinterpretations by the great eighteenth-century sculptors.
-JF



Footnotes
(For key to shortened references see bibliography in Allen, Italian Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2022.)

1. See Haskell and Penny 1981, pp. 56–60, for the sculpture’s popularity in seventeenth-century Florence.
2. These include ancient sculptures but also works by Giambologna, Jacopo Sansovino, Cellini, and Michelangelo. See C. Avery 1976 and, for the most recent list, Warren 2010, p. 225 n. 7.
3. Princely Collections of Liechtenstein, Vienna, SK537, commissioned in 1695 by Prince Johann Adam Andreas I von Liechtenstein (see Kugel 2008, p. 104, no. 25); Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, commissioned by the duke of Marlborough (see Ciechanowiecki 1973); Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, F73-3. For Venus de’ Medici statuettes attributed to Soldani, see C. Avery 1976, p. 166, fig. 1, and Christie’s, London, July 5, 2006, lot 245.