Aphrodite Art Nouveau

Aphrodite Pselioumene.
Patinated and gilt bronze.
Germany.
Second half of the 19^th century.
h. 48 cm (60 cm with base).

An Art Nouveau patinated and gilt bronze statue of Aphrodite known as Pselioumene attributed to Praxiteles.

In 1898, the great French philologist, art historian and archaeologist, Salomon Reinach, professor at the École du Louvre, noticed a cast of a statuette in the cabinet of the curator of the Cologne Museum, ‘0.48 cm high, which beauty called [his] attention’. Both the curator of the Cologne Museum and Reinach himself, who had nevertheless listed antique bronzes of the same type, ignored the original ; it was said at the time that the original had been lost somewhere in Russia. 

Twenty-seven years later, a Parisian antiquarian, probably Joseph Brummer, from whom the Museum of Saint-Germain had recently bought some Mithraic sculptures found in Southern Gaul, rung at Salomon Reinach's door with the lost Russian original in his hands.

It was a bronze statuette clearly representing Aphrodite, and in fact belonged to a Viennese collector who had lent it to Brummer for him to request Reinach's examination. It was 48 cm high indeed, with the right arm bent at shoulder height and the left hand at hip level, holding an apple.

The provenance of the antique original is known to us thanks to a remarkable anecdote : Waldemar Deonna, then director of the Museum of Geneva, announced in 1924 that he had recognised a sculpture similar to that from Cologne, which Reinach had published in 1899 in the Revue archéologique. Deonna recognised it in the background of a painting belonging to his grandson, painted in 1823 and now in the Museum of Geneva.The background of the painting was painted by the Swiss painter François Ferrière, who had settled in St-Petersburg in 1805 before going to Moscow in 1812. It was the Swiss art historian David Baud-Body, who first published this portrait in 1902 in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, who wrote about François Ferrière's Russian career, long before Waldemar Deonna became interested in this statuette. Salomon Reinach concluded that this bronze must have been acquired during the Grand Tour of a Russian aristocrat before 1812 ; that it had probably been found in Campania, and that it could have come from Pompeii or Herculaneum.  

Two remarkable details distinguish the Greek bronze original, lost in some Russian collection in the 19^th century, which only reappeared in 1925, from the German cast, published by Reinach in 1899 and already known before him : the German Aphrodite has three small circles in relief on her headband ; moreover, she wears not one but two armlets around her right arm, unlike the Russian original.

This detail makes it possible to identify with certainty that it was from the altered German cast in the Cologne Museum that this bronze was made, and consequently to estimate that its date of manufacture was probably before 1925, by which time, with the Russian original known, it is unlikely that the altered German cast served as a mould for the artists. 

This Aphrodite in gilded and patinated bronze is of the same workmanship and style as a counterpart Eve after Conrad Meit, also in patinated and gilt bronze.

Sources

Salomon Reinach, « Deux nouvelles statues d’Aphrodite », dans Monuments et mémoires de la Fondation Eugène Piot, 1924, t. 27, 2.

Salomon Reinach, Répertoire de la statuaire grecque et romaine, t. II, vol. 1, Paris, 1908.

Henry Beauchamp Walters, Catalogue of the bronzes, Greek, Roman, and Etruscan in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Londres, 1899.

André de Ridder, Collection de Clercq, t. III, Paris, 1905.

Marion True, The Gods Delight. The Human Figure in Classical Bronze, Cleveland, 1988.

Carol Mattusch, Classical Bronzes. The Art and Craft of Greek Roman Statuary, Ithaca, 1996.