Bathing Venus

Archival documents suggest that it was presented to King Henri IV of France with other bronzes as a diplomatic gift from Ferdinando I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, to embellish the gardens of the Royal castle in Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

The bronze Venus reappeared around 1960 in the possession of a scrap-metal dealer near Paris, who seemed to have obtained it from the Château de Chantemesle[3] (sometimes spelt Chantemerle) in Corbeil-Essonnes (Île-de-France), which had been demolished in the same years.

After having been first described as a Swedish late 17th century aftercast of the Getty Venus,[4] the bronze is today internationally recognized by leading scholars as an autograph work by Giambologna.

[5] The German expert for Florentine sculpture Nicole Hegener considered the rediscovery of the bronze Bathing Venus as “the kind of sensation that occurs only once a century”.

As Venus Genetrix, the mythological ancestor to Julius Caesar, she played a central role in the political representation of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

In monumental sculpture, Jacopo Sansovino (1486-1570) seems to have been the first modern sculptor to bring them back to life and to make two figures of Venus, now lost.

[7] To enhance the erotic attraction of the female nude, the artist has contrived that the goddess hides her face behind her raised arm holding up a vessel, with which she is pouring water on her body.

[12] “The specific form of the anthemion with the stepped band was especially common in France around 1600, which it leads Rudigier plausibly to the theory that the ornament was selected intentionally to cater for French tastes at the court of Henri IV.

The same ornament as on the base of the bronze can be found on the facade of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre, begun in 1595, one of the most important buildings erected for Henri IV.

As Satzinger points out: “… otherwise, when inscribing the day of casting (not punched but engraved with a chiselling tool), he [Meyer] would logistically have chosen ‘Die 25 Novemb[bris] or “XXV Novembris’, instead of the Latin and German mixed form ‘Anno 1597 / Den 25 Novembe[r]’…The ambiguity of the Latin phrase, however, becomes clearer in the German translation: ‘Mich machte Gerhardt Meyer zu Stockholm’” indicating “rather the place of his workshop or his origin”.

It should be exclusively the domain of the only scholarly discipline concerned with the reading of old texts - palaeography.”[18] In 1996, the American art historian Gino Corti, the doyen of Florentine archival research, had already written: “It is really ANNO 1597, and in the next line it is: 25 November, even if the two 5s are a bit different: for me there is no doubt.”[19] Up until the 18th century, there existed two equivalent forms of the 5: one with and one without stroke on the top.

The reason for this is a casting fault underneath, a so-called Lunker, which made the material so thin in this spot that punching in a letter would have created a hole.

[24] The hypothesis of an aftercast contradicts the evidence delivered already by Peggy Fogelman [link zu Wikipedia] in 2002: “A comparison of measurements reveals that some dimensions of the marble original are actually smaller than those of the bronze copy, while others are larger.

The Swedish art historian Lars Olof Larsson excludes a Swedish origin “(…) the bronze Venus could not have been made in Sweden- neither in 1597 nor in 1697.The supporting documentation and the stylistic judgments demonstrate, with all the clarity one could wish for, that nothing speaks against the acceptance of it as an autograph work by Giovanni Bologna, which was cast in Florence by a hitherto unknown but extremely talented founder from Stockholm”.

In his preface of this publication Bertrand Jestaz writes about: « the solid evidence that the Venus, dated 1597, is assuredly a masterpiece by Giambologna, and it is more than probable that it was part of the bronzes presented to Henri IV by Ferdinando I de’Medici.

In the catalogue entry, the director of the Uffizi and curator of the exhibition, Eike D. Schmidt, calls the bronze Bathing Venus a masterpiece of 16th century Italian art.

Subsequently Peter Dreyer published in 2021[31] and 2022[32] two articles delivering the palaeographical evidence that the third digit of the date reads as a 5, and demonstrating that Diemer’s approach is methodologically untenable.