Modern Copies
The Medici Venus is one of the most-copied antiquities. Louis XIV had no less than five, marbles by Carlier, Clérion, Coysevox and Frémery, and a bronze by the Keller brothers. (Haskell and Penny, p. 325). In lead, copies of the Venus de' Medici stand in many English and European gardens, sometimes protected by small temples; in small bronze reductions it figured among the most familiar of the antiquities represented in collectors' cabinets: in Greuze's portrait of Claude-Henri Watelet, ca 1763-65, the connoisseur and author of L'Art de peindre is shown with calipers and a notebook, regarding a bronze statuette of the Venus de' Medici, as if in the act of deducing the ideal proportions of the female figure from the sculpture's example. The Venus de' Medici was even reproduced in Sèvres biscuit porcelain, which had the matte whiteness of marble.
American sculptor Hiram Powers based his 1844 statue The Greek Slave on the Venus de' Medici.
Read more about this topic: Venus De' Medici
Famous quotes containing the words modern and/or copies:
“A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“The only good copies are those which make us see the absurdity of bad originals.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)