For Venus Statue, It's All In Her Head

For the first time in possibly 170 years, a Roman marble statue of Venus will be reunited with its head.

Both pieces are going to the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University, where conservators will piece them back together.

The museum bought the charmingly prudish portrait of the goddess of love — called Aphrodite by the Greeks and Venus by the Romans — for $968,000 at a Sotheby's auction in New York on June 6. A private collector in Houston agreed to sell the head at auction to the buyer of the body. The head, which sold for about $50,000, was last documented attached to the body in 1836.

The 4-foot-6-inch statue is a marble copy from the late first century of an earlier Greek bronze sculpture, which many scholars argue is the most widely reproduced female statue in antiquity.

One of the copies, on view at Rome's Capitoline Museums since the 18th century, counted Mark Twain among its admirers, and was one of a handful of artworks that inspired neoclassical artists. Today, it's one of the most visited attractions at the Capitoline Museums.

"Sculptures like the one on its way to Atlanta are very important because they were widely influential," said Cornelius Vermeule, former curator of classical art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

While there are thousands of similar images of Venus in all sorts of sizes and materials, very few statues are as large and nearly intact as this one, missing only the right arm.

"When you have one of the best and most complete examples of one of the finest statues in the ancient world, that's rather thrilling," said Jasper Gaunt, curator of Greek and Roman Art at the Carlos, which bought the statue with a donation from Thalia Carlos, widow of the museum's namesake. Michael Carlos, who died in 2002, made a fortune in the wine and spirits wholesale industry.

It portrays a Venus caught off guard as, having removed all her clothes to take a bath, she glimpses an unseen onlooker. She tries to cover herself with her hands, with a result that's more provocative than protective. A small figure of Eros rides a dolphin at her feet, a reference to the goddess' birth from the sea.

"She's a little coy about it, a delightful combination of alarm and delight," Gaunt said. "The great contribution of the Greeks is the nude. The ancients thought this was the pre-eminent type of female nude."

The statue dates from a time when Roman emperors were reviving all things Greek from literature to the arts. It probably stood next to a fountain or pool in the gardens of a wealthy villa somewhere in the Roman Empire, possibly in today's France, where the statue was first documented in the collection of Napoleon's art adviser in the 1830s, Gaunt said.

It'll be a few months before the statue is exhibited, since the pieces still need to be shipped to the museum and then will need extensive cleaning and careful rejoining of head and body.

The Venus is the second major acquisition this spring by the Carlos, following a sculpted Roman altar from Augustus' era.