Venus of Arles
Unknown, after a Greek original in the manner of Praxiteles; restored by François Girardon (Girardon 1628-1715) · Roman, late 1st century BC
Not currently on display. ON LOAN AND NOT VISIBLE AT THE LOUVRE at the time of writing: lent to the Musée départemental Arles antique for the exhibition Le Passage de Vénus, 24 April to 31 October 2026. The Louvre collections database currently lists her location as Arles. Her permanent Louvre gallery (expected to be a Greek and Roman room in Sully, Level 0) is not confirmed, so room and room_name are left blank. Also carries the antiquities number Ma 439.
Aphrodite stands half undressed, the mantle fallen to her hips and held there only by the pressure of her thighs, her head inclined and her hair bound in a broad band. In her raised left hand is a mirror, in the lowered right an apple. The pose belongs to a famous Greek formula of the fourth century BC, the moment when the goddess has stepped out of the bath and become aware of being watched, and the body is built on a long slow curve that shifts the weight onto one leg and drops the opposite shoulder.
The marble is Hymettian, quarried near Athens, and the carving is Roman work of the late first century BC, a period when wealthy patrons in Gaul commissioned Greek-looking statuary for public buildings. What you see, though, is a hybrid object. When the figure reached Paris it was armless and damaged, and François Girardon, Louis XIV's sculptor, recut and completed it in the 1680s in a frankly baroque manner, smoothing the torso and giving her the attributes she now holds. Modern scholars think the original may have held something quite different, and that the goddess may not even have been Venus.
Workmen digging in the Roman theatre of Arles in 1651 found the statue in three pieces near the stage building. The town presented it to Louis XIV in 1684 in a bid for royal favour, and it stood in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles before passing to the Louvre in 1798. Arles has asked for her return ever since, and in 2026 she went back to the city for a single summer exhibition, the first time she had been home in three hundred and seventy-five years.
Did You Know? Girardon did not merely mend her: he recarved the surviving arms into new ones holding a mirror and an apple, so the attributes visitors see are seventeenth-century French rather than Roman.
Unlock the Full Guide
Read every room and listen to every work in all museums with premium.