Colonna Venus

{{Short description|Roman marble copy of Praxiteles sculpture}}

File:Afrodite cnidia.jpg 812)]]

The Colonna Venus is a Roman marble copy of the lost Aphrodite of Cnidus sculpture by Praxiteles, conserved in the Museo Pio-Clementino as a part of the Vatican Museums' collections. It is now the best-known and perhaps most faithful Roman copy of Praxiteles's original.

The Colonna Venus is one of four marble Venuses presented in 1783 to Pope Pius VI by Filippo Giuseppe Colonna;[http://www.sardimpex.com/colonna/COLONNA02.htm÷ L1.Don Filippo III Giuseppe Colonna, principe di Paliano and hereditary Gran Connestabile of Naples]{{dead link|date=August 2017 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}; see Haskell and Penny 1981:331, as "the Conestabile Colonna". this, the best of them, was published in Ennio Quirino Visconti's catalogue of the Museo Pio-Clementino,{{cite book | first=Ennio Quirino |last=Visconti |title=Il Museo Pio-Clementino |url=https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/visconti1782ga |volume=1 |chapter=Plate XI. |chapter-url=https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/visconti1782bd1/0125/image,info |author-link=Ennio Quirino Visconti}} where it was identified for the first time as a copy of the Cnidian Venus.{{cn|date=December 2022}} Immediately it eclipsed the somewhat flaccid variant of the same model that, as the Belvedere Venus, had long been in the Vatican collections.{{efn|The Vatican Venus was first referred to in a document of 1536, as a recent gift to the Pope (Paul III Farnese from the Governor of Rome. Though provided with stucco drapery, it was removed from public view by Pope Gregory XIV, {{lang|it|"nemico di ogni nuditá dell'arte"}} ["enemy of all nudity in art"] and placed in storage, all access to it forbidden; it remains in storage at the Vatican Museums today.{{sfnp|Haskell|Penny|1981|loc=cat. no. 90, pp 330-31}}}} During the 19th and early 20th centuries, a prudish tin drape was modestly wrapped around the legs of the Colonna statue{{efn|"by a misplaced sense of pretended decency" Adolf Michaelis wrote, in "The Cnidian Aphrodite of Praxiteles", The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 8 (1887), p 324.}}{{snd}} this was removed in 1932,{{sfnp|Haskell|Penny|1981|page=331}} when the statue was removed to the Gabinetto delle Maschere where it can be seen today.

When Christian Blinkenberg wrote the first modern monograph of the Cnidian Aphrodite in 1933,{{cite book|first=Christian |last=Blinkenberg |title=Knidia; Beiträge zur Kenntnis der praxitelischen Aphrodite |publisher=Levin & Munksgaard |language=DE |location= Copenhagen |year=1933}}; his view is supported by {{cite journal |first=M. |last=Pfrommer |title=Zur Colonna Venus: ein späthellenistische Redaktion der Knidischen Aphrodite |journal=Istanbuler Mitteilungen |volume=35 |year=1985 |pages=173–80}} he found the Colonna Aphrodite and the Belvedere Aphrodite to most accurately reflect the original, mediated through a Hellenistic copy.{{cite book |first=Christine |last=Mitchell Havelock |title=The Aphrodite of Knidos and her successors : a historical review of the female nude in Greek art |date= 2010 |orig-date=1995 |page=26 |isbn=9780472032778 |publisher=University of Michigan Press |location=Ann Arbor}}