Headless statue of Venus
The sculpture depicts a standing female figure, headless and draped, wearing solely a himation, tucked and pulled across the waist, that leaves the bust uncovered. The cloak falls to the ground concealing the whole of the legs, and one of its ends, crossing the back, was draped over the left arm, as the parts still preserved show. The right leg bears the weight, while the left is bent and slightly pushed sideways; the tip of the left foot, now broken away, was coming out from under the garment.
Our exemplar, of good quality, can be easily identified with the type called “Marine Venus”, as attested by the numerous existing Roman copies whose wide repertory, with little substantial variations, is discussed by M. Bieber.
Unlike several other copies, our statue must have been sculpted without the typical lateral support consisting in a rock and a dolphin, from which derived the name of the type; the statue is in fact characterized by a less unbalanced movement of the hips and of the bust that thus retains a vertical posture; the left arm, now lost, was probably bent with the hand resting over the hip and concealed by the garment; the lowered right arm was instead parallel to the side or, more unlikely, raised and bent sideways as it is reconstructed in other exemplars; the head, here missing, was probably turned towards the flexed leg.
It is useful to compare our statue to that of the Venus in the Vatican Museums, Museo Chiaramonti, even though the latter shows the left arm clinging over the corresponding hip; also the Venus in the British Museum is very similar to ours even if it has a reversed movement of the limbs; lastly, the most fitting comparison appears to be the one with the Marine Venus in Berlin’s Staatliche Museen, for both the distribution of the weights and the movement of the limbs, but especially for the treatment of the drapery, even if on our exemplar the folds are carved in a more simplified manner.
On grounds of the comparison with such works it is possible to frame chronologically our statue depicting a Marine Venus around the middle of the II century AD, and to consider it a Roman copy of an Hellenistic work, most probably originally conceived in Pergamon because of its sensuality and partial nudity of the body, elements found in copies of other Pergamene subjects such as the Hermaphroditus, the sleeping Ariadne and the famous Venus of Milos.
BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCE: A Description of the Collection of Ancient Marbles in the British Museum, London 1812, Part I, pl. VIII; Beschreibung der Antiken Skulpturen, Berlin 1891, pp. 117-118, n. 276Bieber M., Ancient Copies. Contributions to the History of Greek and Roman Art, New York 1977, pl. 32-33; Stadler M. (ed.), Museo Chiaramonti, Berlin-New York 1995, vol. 2, fig. 452, p. 770.