The goddess is depicted in a fugitive, momentary pose, as if surprised in the act of emerging from the sea, to which the dolphin at her feet alludes.

The Medici Venus is one of the most celebrated antiquities. Louis XIV for example had no less than five versions of this statue. Still today we can admire multiple life size statues adorn many grand parcs in Europe. In small bronze reductions, as our statuette, it figured among the most familiar of the antiquities represented in collectors’ cabinets: in Greuze’s portrait of Claude-Henri Watelet, ca 1763-65, the connoisseur and author of L’art de peindre is shown with calipers and a notebook, regarding a bronze statuette of the Venus de’Medici, as if in the act of deducing the ideal proportions of the female figure from the sculpture’s example.