Female Figure (Giambologna)
[3] In a Bavarian document of 1635 the sculpture is called for the first time "Bathsheba", a naming that was maintained until it was acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum.
As shown by Herbert Keutner this subject was unknown in Florentine late Renaissance art and therefore this naming cannot be original.
[4] By this renaming the frivolous figure was reinterpreted as a representation of morally reprehensive sexual desire, reflecting the new prudish atmosphere of the catholic Counterreformation.
[8] According to the Getty, her complex positioning shows her "bathing in a graceful serpentine pose, characteristic of Mannerist elegance ... figura serpentinata".
[10] Avery thinks that given the somewhat awkward pose the statue was intended to be placed in a niche, as "the frontal view is curiously constricted and the most satisfactory one is diagonally from the left.
"[11] Avery suggests a now lost ancient Roman figure of a Bathing Venus as a possible source, one he identifies in a drawing showing three points of view, made by Maarten van Heemskerck during a visit to Rome around 1535.
[13] A red wax model attributed to Giambologna (private collection), which is missing its limbs and head, and slumps backwards, is close in pose to the Getty-statue, especially in the left shoulder and angle of the neck.
[14] There is a bronze Bathing Venus representing the same model of the marble with differences in posture and details, signed by its caster: "Me fecit Gerhardt Meyer Homiae/ Den 25 November 1597".
[15] Today it is considered by a number of leading scholars as Giambologna's autograph version of the Getty-marble in pristine condition, possibly made for King Henri IV of France.
[16] Charles Avery, already in 1983 when publishing the Getty-marble, observed that the pose of the Bathing Venus "would be easier to render using the tensile structure of metal- i. e. bronze over an iron armature".
[20] During the second restoration, the original vessel was erroneously reconstructed by imitating the jar of Adriaen de Vries' later Mercury and Psyche group (Paris, Louvre).
[27] Then, in 1635 the figure seems to be mentioned among works of art that had been plundered from the Munich residence by Swedish troops in 1632 during the Thirty Year War and whose whereabouts Duke Maximilian of Bavaria wanted to know about.
One of his magistrates reported that a life size marble statue of a Bathsheba was brought to Stockholm on the orders of king Gustav Adolph.
[28] This identification of the Getty-marble with the figure mentioned by Borghini and in this Bavarian document, is however contradicted by Lauritz de Thurah (Den danske Vitruvius, 1746) claiming that the sculpture was part of the Swedish war booty from Prague 1648.
Giambologna's figure had fallen into oblivion until 1970 when Gunnar W. Lundberg first published it in a Swedish art historical journal.
Together with the Triton in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York the Bathing Venus is today the only large figure by Giambologna outside Europe, and one of the most important sculptures of the Italian Renaissance in the US.
