Art › Florence › The Uffizi
Venus de’ Medici
The marble goddess in the middle of the Tribuna, once the most admired statue in Europe.
Venus turns as if surprised while bathing, a dolphin at her feet. A Greek sculptor carved her in the first century BC, after the Aphrodite of Knidos of Praxiteles; the base names Kleomenes, son of Apollodoros, of Athens.
The Medici kept her in their villa in Rome and brought her to Florence in 1677, to the red-velvet octagon of the Tribuna. Travellers on the Grand Tour came to see her above all else. Napoleon took her to Paris in 1802; she came back in 1815. Stand before it in 3D ›
