Colonna Venus

The Colonna Venus is a Roman marble copy of the lost Aphrodite of Cnidus sculpture by Praxiteles, conserved in the Museo Pio-Clementino as a part of the Vatican Museums' collections.

It is now the best-known and perhaps most faithful Roman copy of Praxiteles's original.

The Colonna Venus is one of four marble Venuses presented in 1783 to Pope Pius VI by Filippo Giuseppe Colonna;[1] this, the best of them, was published in Ennio Quirino Visconti's catalogue of the Museo Pio-Clementino,[2] where it was identified for the first time as a copy of the Cnidian Venus.

[citation needed] Immediately it eclipsed the somewhat flaccid variant of the same model that, as the Belvedere Venus, had long been in the Vatican collections.

[a] During the 19th and early 20th centuries, a prudish tin drape was modestly wrapped around the legs of the Colonna statue[b] – this was removed in 1932,[4] when the statue was removed to the Gabinetto delle Maschere where it can be seen today.