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 VIby Filippo Giuseppe Colonna;[1] this, the best of them, was published in Ennio Quirino Visconti's catalogue of the Museo Pio-Clementino,[2] where it was identified for the first time as a copy of the Cnidian Venus.[citation needed] Immediately it eclipsed the somewhat flaccid variant of the same model that, as the Belvedere Venus, had long been in the Vatican collections.[a] During the 19th and early 20th centuries, a prudish tin drape was modestly wrapped around the legs of the Colonna statue[b] – this was removed in 1932,[4] 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,[5] he found the Colonna Aphrodite and the Belvedere Aphrodite to most accurately reflect the original, mediated through a Hellenistic copy.[6]
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