"Crouching Venus"
Signed G. Niccoly and with text: F.P. Lanson Luce, Hamburg (?). Marble, height 66 cm.
F. Haskell and N. Penny, "Taste and the Antique", 1981, the motif described at pp.321-323.
The "Crouching Venus" is a composition that goes back to an ancient Hellenistic sculpture. The sculpture where the goddess surprised at her bath was placed in Villa Medici in Rome but now belongs, since the end of the 18th Century, to the collections of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Several artists have throughout history interpret the model and sometimes reinterpreted the subject. The artist Giambolognas variation are among the most famous and copied.