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| Cesi Juno Roman marble copy of earlier Hellenistic work Capitoline Museum |
"Aldrovandi who saw this statue without arms described it as an Amazon and mentioned that Michelangelo praised it as the most beautiful object in Rome and that the King of France had frequently had copies made from it. Casts of at least the head had, it seems, been made for Marco Benavides before 1543. Michelangelo's admiration was still being recorded in the early seventeenth century, and it is surprising that the statue is not included in Perrier's anthology of the most admired statues in Rome. Later in the century, however, it was given two plates in Jan de Bisschop's anthology [below] and it was copied in marble for Versailles by Lespingola. This copy (now in the Tuileries Gardens) was engraved as a Berenice, but in de Rossi's anthology of prints in 1704 the statue is still called an Amazon, as it is also in the 1733 inventory of the Albani collection. Maffei, however, in his commentary on de Rossi's plates suggested that the figure, which he praised very highly, represented Juno, or possibly a portrait of one of the family of Augustus in the guise of that goddess, and the Albani inventory gives Juno as an alternative name. ... The drapery was especially admired – in fact the Germans called it the 'beautifully draped' Juno – and so too was the head, although Visconti, who thought that the figure perhaps represented Melpomene, considered this to be an addition. ... "
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| Jan de Bisschop Cesi Juno 1660s etching Harvard Art Museums |
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| Jan de Bisschop Cesi Juno 1660s etching Harvard Art Museums |
". . . But the arms were not highly thought of and the Surintendant des Batiments, the Comte d'Angiviller, although in general unsympathetic to attempts to improve upon antiquity, did not insist that Michallon should imitate them exactly in the copy which he had taken over from Chardigny. Sir Joshua Reynolds also changed their position when he took the statue as the model for Fortitude in the window he designed for New College, Oxford."
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| Pierre Bouillon Cesi Juno ca. 1820 etching Philadelphia Museum of Art |
This statue, like those of Roma and Weeping Dacia, stood in the Cesi sculpture garden in Rome from the early 1500s. There were several of these privately owned – but publicly viewable – collections of ancient marbles in Rome. Serious painting in the city flourished under the influence of these flawed and misapprehended antique sculptures. An example can be seen below, in one of Poussin's best-known paintings.
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| Nicolas Poussin Et in Aracdia ego (The Arcadian Shepherds) 1638-39 oil on canvas Louvre |
Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey published Nicolas Poussin : Friendship and the Love of Painting in 1996. In that book one of their most important projects was to document Poussin's early study of Rome's ancient statues in order to shape a personal canon of ideal types for his painted compositions. "As we have seen in chapter one, the famous Cesi Juno was Poussin's and Duquesnoy's ideal model for the draped and regally mature female form, and this statue was specifically the model for the shepherdess in the Arcadian Shepherds. The formal relation in this case, especially so far as the pose of the left arm and the drapery is concerned, is very precise."
The reliable irony of art ensured that the Juno's awkward left arm and pointy elbow – contributed by restorers – should be the identifying feature connecting statue and painting, the feature Poussin chose to push forward. In addition to his manifest admiration for the Cesi Juno, Poussin is known to have modeled a small wax copy of the Belvedere Cleopatra. It was photographed below in the mid-19th century, framed by dark-veined marble columns and with a painted palm backdrop. The statue's base was part of a Roman sarcophagus.
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| James Anderson Cleopatra ca. 1845-55 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Albert Christoph Reindel Cleopatra 1808 etching, engraving Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Pompeo Batoni Portrait of Thomas William Coke 1774 oil on canvas Holkham Hall, Norfolk |
Toward the end of the 18th century the suggestion gained ground that the Vatican sculpture represented Ariadne rather than Cleopatra. There was also talk of Dido. "Painters had frequently used a reclining figure (perhaps ultimately derived from this statue) to portray some abandoned heroine, and it may therefore be of special significance that in 1774 Pompeo Batoni should have included the statue in his beautiful portrait of Thomas William Coke (above) : the picture was commissioned by the unhappy Countess of Albany, who had recently married the claimant to the English throne (a drunken failure more than twice her age) but who was said to be in love with the twenty-year-old Coke who stands nonchalantly in front of the languishing woman, elegant in his Van Dyck fancy dress of salmon pink and silvery white."
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| Jan de Bisschop Cleopatra 1671 etching Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Marcantonio Raimondi Relief Frieze from a Sarcophagus Bacchanal with Silenus ca. 1510-27 engraving Metropolitan Museum of Art |
The Belvedere Cleopatra is echoed in the early engraving above (to the right of the central figure group) languorously reclining in the guise of a nymph. At least 150 years later, in the baroque mezzotint below, a similar strategy is evident – less an imitation of the sculpture than a fairly literal quotation of it, with increased luridness.
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| Pierce Tempest, publisher Cleopatra ca. 1678-1717 mezzotint British Museum |
The Callipygian Venus was recorded at Palazzo Farnese in Rome in the 16th century. Over the years it was known by several other names as well, including La Bergère Grecque ; Venus aux belles fesses ; Venus drying herself ; Venus leaving the bath ; Shifting Venus ; La Belle Victorieuse. Several Farnese statues passed eventually, like this one, into the national collection at Naples. The following stereograph taken around 1900 shows the Naples sculpture gallery with the Callipygian Venus in the foreground.
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| Underwood and Underwood, Publisher Sculpture gallery at the Museo Nazionale, Naples ca. 1900 stereograph Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Anonymous photographer Callipygian Venus Roman marble copy of an earlier Hellensitc work Museo Nazionale, Naples |
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| Antonio Susini Callipygian Venus ca. 1600-1624 copy - bronze statuette Victoria & Albert Museum |
"The statue was sometimes in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries described as Venus leaving the bath, or drying herself, but it was more commonly known then and later as 'la Bergère Grecque' or 'La Belle Victoriouse', in reference to a story told by the late second or early third-century author Athenaeus, and retold by Cartari in his popular guide to mythology, in which two daughters of a peasant settled a dispute concerning which had the more shapely buttocks by accosting a young man on the highway who was unknown to both of them and inviting him to judge. His choice was his reward, and his brother hearing of the contest preferred and thus won the other girl. The double marriage that ensued so improved the girls' fortunes that they dedicated a temple to Venus Callipygos at Syracuse. It seems to have been supposed that the cult statue of the goddess commemorated the exhibitionism of her votaries ..."
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| Isaac Becket Adrian Beverland drawing the Callipygian Venus in a landscape of many obelisks 1686 mezzotint British Museum |
Quoted passages are from Taste and the Antique by Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny (Yale University Press, 1981).