Venus de Brizet

[2] Gonon notified an amateur archaeologist, Jean Renaud, a member of the local learned society the Diana de Montbrison.

On the basis of photographs sent by another member of the society, the Hellenist Mario Meunier, former secretary of Rodin, experts such as Adrien Blanchet, member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and Alexandre Philadelpheus, director of the Athens National Archaeological Museum, the statue was dated to the end of the 2nd century CE (the hairstyle reminiscent of the Empress Faustine the Younger) and it was thought that the neo-Attic Venus Anadyomene was a Roman copy of a Greek Aphrodite.

[3][4] As early as November 1938, a journalist from the magazine Reflets said was the work of a young artist of Italian origin from Saint-Etienne, Francois Cremonese (1907–2002).

He carved the statue in Tuscan marble (after a plaster maquette modelled on a young Polish woman, Anna Studnicka).

[3] To convince Thiollier and Meley, curator of the museum of Saint-Etienne, Cremonese revealed the missing pieces in December 1938 and adhered them to the statue.