The Venus de Medici a Questionable Type
This famous statue, when found in the seventeenth century in the Villa of Hadrian, near Tivoli, was broken into eleven pieces; only the hands and a portion of the arms were wanting. It was taken to Florence by Cosmo de Medici, and placed in the tribune of the Uffizi.
Lübke, in his “History of Art,” says: “The goddess displays the lineaments of her shapely form to the eye completely nude, yet not in naïve self-forgetfulness, or in the sublime abandon of conquest, but with conscious premeditation; not without a certain shame-faced coyness which is expressed in the position of the arms, with their effort at concealment of the bosom and thighs, and in the coy turning of the head to one side. With all the delicacy and perfection of artistic finish, with all the noble rhythmical proportion of the limbs, this trait, which betrays the calculating coquette, has but a cold effect.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne says: “She is very beautiful, very satisfactory, and has a fresh and new charm about her, unreached by any cast or copy. I felt a kind of tenderness for her—an affection, not as if she were a woman, but all womanhood in one. Her modest attitude—which, before I saw her, I had not liked, deeming it might be an artificial shame—is partly what unmakes her as a heathen goddess, and softens her into woman. There is a slight degree of alarm, too, in her face; not that she really thinks that anybody is looking at her; yet the idea has flitted through her mind and startled her a little. Her face is so beautiful and so intellectual that it is not dazzled out of sight by her form. The world has not grown weary of her in all these ages, and mortal man may look on her with new delight from infancy to old age.”
If anything is safe in this iconoclastic age it might be supposed to be such reputation for beauty and grace. Connoisseurs of all nations have joined in doing homage to the ancient sculptor’s skill. How many visitors to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence have stood, Murray or Appleton in hand, gazing at the undraped figure without a thought of questioning these learned persons! But of late years there have been sceptics daring enough to class this with the Apollo Belvedere as a sample of ancient art that has been “monstrously overrated,” and now comes no less an authority than Holman Hunt to assure us that the Venus de Medici, to use a popular phrase, “won’t do.” There is a little anecdote attaching to this expression of opinion.
Some years ago, at the house of Sir Richard Owen, the great naturalist, Mr. Hunt met that professor of sanitary science, the late Sir Edwin Chadwick, who began a conversation thus: “As a Commissioner of Health, I must profess myself altogether opposed to the artistic theory of beauty. There is the Venus de Medici, which you artists regard as giving the perfect type of female form. I should require that a typical statue with such pretensions should bear evidence of perfect power of life, with steady prospect of health and signs of mental vigor; but she has neither. Her chest is narrow, indicating unrobust lungs, her limbs are without evidence of due training of muscles, her shoulders are not well braced up, and her cranium, and her face, too, are deficient in all traits of intellect. She would be a miserable mistress of a house and a contemptible mother.” But the listener assured the sage critic that he had made a most artistic criticism of the statue, and that his auditor would join in every word as to his standard of requirements. Mr. Hunt was aware, he said, that he was talking heresy to the mass of persons who accepted the traditional jargon of the cognoscenti on trust, but in his opinion “the work belongs to the decadence of Roman virtue and vitality, and its merit lies alone in the rendering of a voluptuous being without mind or soul.” If no authorities of equal weight will stand forth in defence of this marble lady, it is to be feared that the famous Venus de Medici will soon be ranked among impostors. The strange part of the matter is that it has taken more than two hundred years to find her out.