Archaeology | Sculptures | Statues | Fragment of a statue of Aphrodite with dolphin | Artwork profile

White marble

H. 62 cm; w. 30 cm; d. 23 cm

End of the I – II century AD


Report

Fragment of a statue of Aphrodite with dolphin

Fragment of a nude female statue depicting Aphrodite with dolphin, of which only the portion from the waist to the knee is preserved. The piece belongs to the group of statues portraying the so-called Pudic Aphrodite and it appears to be a copy of the Medici type, named after the famous artefact housed in the Uffizi Gallery, signed by the Athenian copyist Cleomenes son of Apollodorus (I cent. BC) (Saladino V. (ed.), Musei e Gallerie, Firenze gli Uffizi, Sculture antiche, Firenze 1983).

Though fragmentary, our piece retains some features that prove to be proper to the goddess iconography, thus allowing its correct identification: the left leg bears the weight, while the right with the bent knee had to be slightly pushed backwards; the arms were crossed on the front of the body covering her nudity, as in Capitoline type of Kephisodotos, with the right over her breasts and the left over the pubis. In fact our sculpture bears the traces of the small marble bridge that supported the arm concealing the inguen.

It is thus possible to discard the possibility that the statue is instead a copy of the Aphrodite Anadyomene with dolphin, who raises her arms holding locks of wet hair, as she arises from the sea. Differently from the Knidos and Capitoline types, which both have a hydria as support on the side, in the Medici type we find the dolphin, just as we do in our copy, where near the goddess’ thigh there is a fragment of the cetacean tail.

The allusion to the bath thus vanishes, and is instead evoked and celebrated the birth of the goddess from the foam of the sea. Nudity becomes here almost meaningless in the magnification of the feminine beauty.

In our copy the anatomic forms are well shaped and the softness of the flesh is clearly visible, thus recalling the youth of the deity and her delicate, non excessive femininity; also the legs, tight in the instinctive gesture of modesty, appear to become thinner near the knee, as it happens in the Medici type.

The Greek original, though connected with the art of Praxiteles, is influenced by the style of other artists working in the IV century BC and is though to belong to the early decades of the III century BC, while our Roman copy can be dated between the end of the I and the II century AD.