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Lot 127*

A Roman marble Venus Genetrix

Antiquities
3 July 2019, 10:00 BST
London, New Bond Street

Sold for £18,812.50 inc. premium

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A Roman marble Venus Genetrix
Circa 1st Century B.C.
The goddess standing with her weight on her right leg, the left relaxed, wearing a diaphanous chiton, belted at her waist, exposing her left breast and revealing the form of her body beneath, and draped in a voluminous himation, pulled up behind her right shoulder and clasped in her upraised right hand, her left hand also upturned and once holding the now-missing apple, the excess drapery drawn around her right leg and amassed between her legs, the folds falling to the ground, 26.5cm high

Footnotes

Provenance:
Elsa Bloch-Diener (1922-2012) collection, Bern, acquired between 1968 and 1983.
Collection of Elsa Bloch-Diener: Antic Art and Pre Columbian Art; Stuker, Bern, 30 May 2018, lot 693.
Private collection, Switzerland, acquired at the above.

The Venus Genetrix sculpture-type is based on a late 5th Century B.C. Greek bronze by Callimachus, recorded by Pliny in his Natural History, which shows the goddess holding the apple won in the Judgement of Paris in her left hand, and moving to cover her head with her drapery with her right. In this guise, the goddess is associated with domesticity and motherhood. The most notable Roman version of this work is the Aphrodite Fréjus, discovered in the town of the same name in 1650 and now in the Louvre, Paris, acc. no. MA525. For other examples, see the Metropolitan Museum, New York, acc. no. 32.11.3, and M. Bieber, Ancient Copies, New York, 1977, pl.23-26.

The Venus Genetrix type was popularised in the early Julio-Claudian period, when Julius Caesar and Augustus embarked upon a concerted strategy to encourage public acceptance of their identification of the goddess as the progenitor of the gens Iulia. This purported familial link was an important tool in the consolidation of their power, and was most memorably asserted through Caesar's construction of a temple to Venus Genetrix in his forum in Rome in 46 B.C., and Augustus' patronage of Virgil's Aeneid, the epic poem which charted the journey of Venus's son Aeneas to the shores of Italy to found both the city which would one day become Rome, and the gens to which the emperor belonged.

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