Venus of the Esquiline
As Venus from the Esquiline the ancient is marble statue of a nude female figure referred to 1874 in Rome at Piazza Dante on the hill Esquiline was found in an area that in ancient times probably to the Horti Lamiani , one of the imperial gardens, was one. The statue is now part of the collection of the Capitoline Museums in Rome.
The bather, unclothed except for sandals, wears precisely burned locks, her robe lies over a vase depicting the Egyptian uraeus snake - a symbol of the pharaoh's dignity . Both arms are missing from the statue today.
The Roman sculpture is dated to the Claudian period, around 50 AD.
Identification with Cleopatra?
The historian Licinio Glori first suspected in 1955, based on the depiction of the Uraeus snake, that the Venus of Esquiline was a statue of the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra VII . He noted that, for example, her small breasts appeared aesthetically inadequate and even believed he could infer from an alleged pelvic deformation that the depicted woman had recently given birth to a child.
In 1994 Paolo Moreno took up Glori's theory and compared the facial features of the Venus statue with those of two marble heads that are kept in Berlin and in the Vatican Museums and that can be assigned to Cleopatra with some certainty. According to him, at least some physiognomic features of the statue of Venus coincide with the two busts and the coin portraits of the Egyptian queen.
Recently, Bernard Andreae sought further arguments to support Glori's theory. He takes the view that the model of Venus from Esquiline is the golden statue of the deified Cleopatra, which is said to have been erected in Rome by Gaius Julius Caesar .
Andreae argues, among other things, that the facial features of Venus are not as idealized as is usually the case with a goddess statue, but rather appear masculine. In addition, the figure has a hooked nose and thick lower lip, which also appear on Cleopatra's coin portraits. According to him, it is a portrait statue of a person and not an idealized bust of the goddess without individual features, so that the uraeus snake can also be used as an indication of an equation with the Egyptian queen. Finally, the arrangement of the hair is also related to the depictions of the Ptolemaic woman on coins. He justifies the lack of the large eyes that appear in all the coin portraits of Cleopatra with a different style of the Roman sculptor. Andreae estimates that the statue of Venus represents a woman in her early 20s. This is exactly the age of the Egyptian queen when she was in Rome (46–44 BC).
Despite these arguments, the identification of the statue of Venus with Cleopatra has only met with sporadic approval among experts.
literature
- Licinio Glori: Cleopatra. "Venere esquilina" . Bestetti, Roma 1955.
- Bernard Andreae : Cleopatra and the so-called Venus of the Esquiline. In: Ortrud Westheider , Karsten Müller (ed.): Cleopatra and the Caesars. An exhibition by the Bucerius-Kunst-Forum Hamburg, October 28, 2006 to February 4, 2007. Hirmer, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-7774-3245-8 , pp. 14–47.
- Guy Weill Goudchaux: The Venus of Esquiline is not Cleopatra. In: Ortrud Westheider, Karsten Müller (ed.): Cleopatra and the Caesars. An exhibition by the Bucerius-Kunst-Forum Hamburg, October 28, 2006 to February 4, 2007. Hirmer, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-7774-3245-8 , pp. 138–141.
- Christoph Schäfer : Cleopatra . Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2006, ISBN 3-534-15418-5 , pp. 261-263 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Matthias Schulz: The face of the goddess . In: Der Spiegel . No. 42 , 2006, p. 181 ( online ). Berthold Seewald: That's what Cleopatra really looked like . In: Die Welt , October 26, 2006.