Venus de' Medici

Venus de' Medici
Year1st century BCE
TypeMarble
LocationUffizi Gallery, Florence

The Venus de' Medici or Medici Venus is a 1.53 m (5 ft 0 in) tall Hellenistic marble sculpture depicting the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite. It is a 1st-century BC marble copy, perhaps made in Athens, of a bronze original Greek sculpture, following the type of the Aphrodite of Knidos,[1] which would have been made by a sculptor in the immediate Praxitelean tradition, perhaps at the end of the century. It has become one of the navigation points by which the progress of the Western classical tradition is traced, the references to it outline the changes of taste and the process of classical scholarship.[2] It is housed in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy.

  1. ^ Mansuelli
  2. ^ This general theme is the subject of Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (Yale University Press) 1981.