This Roman copy of a Hellenistic original is ultimately derived from the Aphrodite of Knidos by Praxiteles. Rather than using bathing imagery with a water jug at her feet for washing, there is a dolphin denoting the foamy waves from which she was born and has just emerged.
Already known in Rome in the sixteenth century, the Medici Venus was one of the most copied antiquities and a high point of the Grand Tour
Florence, Uffizi 548
Transferred from the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1884
Lippold: Griechische Plastik, 321 (n.18)
Amelung: Führer durch die Antike in Florenz (1896), 67
Brunn-Bruckmann: Denkmäler Griechischer und Römischer Skulptur, pl. 374
Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum 1953, 241-51 for comparison to statue of Aphrodite in New York
Walston: Catalogue of Casts in the Museum of Classical Archaeology (1889), 108, no.563
Reporter: 19 June 1885, 894, no.502
Found in Rome
