This original of this type (from which the following copies derive) is thought to be a lost 3rd- or 2nd-century BCE variation on Praxiteles' work from Asia Minor, which modifies the Praxitelean tradition by a carnal and voluptuous treatment of the subject and the goddess's modest gesture with both hands—rather than only one over the groin, in Praxiteles's original.

[2] Pope Benedict XIV purchased it from the Stazi family in 1752 and gave it to the Capitoline Museums,[3] where it is housed in a niche of its own—called "the cabinet of Venus"—on the first floor of the Palazzo Nuovo on the Campidoglio.

The statue was on loan to the United States and was shown in the rotunda of the West Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. from June 8 to September 18, 2011.

It was later seized, and relocated to Paris by Napoleon under the terms of the Treaty of Tolentino; the Emperor commissioned a marble replica from Joseph Chinard, now at the Château de Compiègne.

When the original was returned to the Capitoline Museums in 1816,[5] the plaster cast that had replaced it during the Napoleonic era was shipped to Britain, where John Flaxman praised it to his students (Haskell and Penny 1981:319).