She is shiny, she is pretty, and she is a star of the Capitoline Museums! Excavated during the Lanciani’s late 19th century excavations of the Horti Lamiani (the decadent pleasure garden of the Republican period subsumed under imperial control in the 1st century A.D.), the so-called “Esquiline Venus” is one of many important sculptures found there.
There are a variety of theories about who she might represent, with some going so far as to see her somewhat athletic, small breasted physique as a a form of body portraiture. What is clear is that the woman (nude but for her sandals) stretches her arms upwards, presumably having just emerged from the bath. Although the arms are missing, it is clear that she was binding her somewhat curly hair with a broad fabric fillet.
The elongated vase bolstering her right leg is draped by a fringed garment, with a cobra twining its easy up the front. The fringed garment is typically associated with the Egyptian goddess Isis and the cobra as well had Egyptian overtones. These attributes have tempted scholars to associate the statue with a Venus-Isis mashup (fitting in that period of ‘Egyptomania’). Some have gone farther (and anything Bernard Andreae writes must be taken seriously!), interpreting her as Cleopatra herself – last of the Egyptian Ptolemaic queens, who used her wits rather than her voluptuousness to so enchant Julius Caesar and Marc Antony….
Whoever she is, the strongly polished ancient surface (so rarely preserved) is something to behold! An incredibly romantic statue, inspiring both Alma-Tadema and Poytner (and me!).
