Italian, 18th century

The discovery of Willem van Tetrode’s bronze reduction of the Venus de’Medici revealed that this most celebrated of antique marble Venuses was known as early as the mid-16th century. By 1638, the Venus was certainly located in the Villa Medici in Rome, from which she acquired her name. In 1677 she was sent to Florence and installed in the Tribuna of the Uffizi, where she remains to this day, having been briefly replaced by Antonio Canova’s Venus Italica during her sojourn in France between 1803 and 1815. The ancient marble is considered to be a Graeco-Roman adaptation of the fabled Aphrodite of Knidos by Praxiteles.