Venus Esquilinskaya

The sculpture was discovered in 1874 on Dante's Square on the Esquiline Hill in Rome, probably in the part where Horti Lamiani ^[1] , one of the imperial gardens, a place famous for finds of ancient sculpture was located. In the XVI and XVII centuries, “Niobids” were found here, a version of the sculptural group “ Laocoon and his sons ”, a bust of the emperor Commodus with the attributes of Hercules and “ Discus ball ”.

After 1870, intensive construction work began in connection with the reconstruction of Rome - the capital of a united Italy ^[2] . The newly found sculpture was included in the collection of the Capitoline Museums ^[3] , where it is currently located in the exposition of the Centrale Montemartini museum ^[4] . The hands of the statue were lost, apparently, when it fell.

The historian Licino Glory ( Italian: Licinio Glori ) in 1955 suggested that this is a portrait of Cleopatra VII . In this regard, the image of a cobra on a vessel near Venus is interpreted as the sacred Uraeus of Egyptian pharaohs. In 1994, Paolo Moreno ( Italian Paolo Moreno ) compared the features of Venus with the sculptural portraits of Cleopatra, stored in Berlin and in the Vatican Museums , as well as images of the queen on coins, and came to the conclusion that at least there is some similarity between them .

The female torso is stored in the Louvre, a repetition of Venus Eskvilinskaya - an example of the work of the eclectic "neo-Attic" school Pasitel . The addition of a woman is characteristic of the Greek "severe style" in the 5th century. BC e.

Clark reports that Venus Esquilinskaya, like the Louvre Torso, is a replica of the lost ancient Greek original, a bronze statue. As the researcher notes, the addition of Venus Eskvilinskaya is still far from the ideal of the classical period:

“However, it [Venus] is desirable, compact, proportional, in reality its proportions were calculated on a simple mathematical scale. The unit of measure is the head. Her height is seven goals, the distance between the breasts, from the chest to the navel and from the navel to the foot — one head ” ^[5] .

According to Robinson:

“The Esquiline Venus is an abnormal work, for as long as the body is modeled with voluptuousness, which almost goes beyond the line separating nudity from naked, the head is made with archaic weight, in the style of the first half of the fifth century” ^[6] .

For several decades after the discovery, Venus Esquilinsky inspired many artists on reconstruction. The most famous among them are the paintings of Laurence Alma-Tadema "Sculptor Model" (1877) and Edward Poynter Diadumene (1884). On both canvases, a woman is depicted with a bandage of fabric that ties her hair (like the Diadumen ). Poynter restored the pose based on the fact that part of the little finger of the left hand of the statue remained on its back. According to the artist, with her left hand, Venus supported her hair, and with her right she wound the fabric.

• Mary Beard, 'Archeology and Collecting in late-nineteenth century Rome', from exhibition catalog to the Royal Academy exhibition "Ancient Art to Post-Impressionism - Masterpieces from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek , Copenhagen"
• Charles Waldstein, 'Pasiteles and Arkesilaos, the Venus Genetrix and the Venus of the Esquiline' , The American Journal of Archeology and of the History of the Fine Arts , Vol. 3, No. 1/2 (Jun., 1887), pp. 1-13
• Das Gesicht der Göttin. , 10.16.2006, Der Spiegel . Hamburg 2006, 42, S. 181
• Berthold Seewald, So sah Kleopatra wirklich aus, Die Welt , October 26, 2006 (in German) [1]
• Bernard Andreae, Dorothea Gall, Günter Grimm, Heinz Heinen et al., “Kleopatra und die Caesaren”, hrsg. von Ortrud Westheider, Karsten Müller (2006: Munich, Hirmer Verlag)
• Cleo Uncovered (exhibition review of "Cleopatra and the Caesars"), Current World Archeology 20, pages 42-43

• 3D-model of the female torso from the Louvre