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- After Antoine Coysevox (1640 - 1720) , model
- French School, Cast by
- Crouching Venus
- France
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- Date: Early 18th century
c. 1700 - c. 1715 (cast) - Object Type: Statuette
- Medium: Bronze. Wood and gilt-bronze base
- Height: 33.3 cm, excluding base
- Length: 30.9 cm, terrain base
- Width: 17 cm, terrain base
- Height: 15.8 cm, base only
- Inv: S188
- Location: Front State Room
- Date: Early 18th century
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- Description
- Provenance
- Further Reading
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- Obtaining full-sized marble copies of antique sculpture had been a long-lasting aspiration of many French kings since the sixteenth century. Numerous copies were commissioned for Louis XIV through the French Academy in Rome in the second half of the seventeenth.
The marble copy of the Crouching Venus was carved by the king’s sculptor, Antoine Coysevox and displayed in the Parterre du Nord at the Château de Versailles paired with a copy of another famed antiquity, the Arrotino or Knife-grinder made by the Florentine sculptor Giovanni Battista Foggini (1652–1725). Whereas Foggini surely copied an original at the time in the Uffizi, it is uncertain which of the many existing antique variants of the Crouching Venus served as the model for Coysevox.
The two originals were unrelated, but their pairing at Versailles popularised them as a pendant often reproduced in small-scale bronze replicas such as our pair.
Our bronzes, probably made in France in the early eighteenth century were acquired by the 3rd Marquess.
- Obtaining full-sized marble copies of antique sculpture had been a long-lasting aspiration of many French kings since the sixteenth century. Numerous copies were commissioned for Louis XIV through the French Academy in Rome in the second half of the seventeenth.