Location: parterre
In the Park of Miramare, closing the view of the parterre, immediately before the Kaffeehaus, a half-naked female figure stands sideways, raising her left arm in an extremely graceful manner, as if portrayed at the moment when she is about to perform a particular dance step.
In reality, the movement refers to a quite different scene: the Miramare sculpture reproduces a masterpiece of classical statuary, the famous Capuan Venus in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, depicted in the act of aiming at a mirror, presumably the shield of Mars, which has unfortunately been lost. A second-century CE Roman marble copy derived from a fourth-century BCE Greek bronze original, the Capuan Venus, named after the place where it was found, is clearly inspired by the much more famous Venus de Milo, an early Hellenistic work kept at the Louvre, of which it takes the features of the drapery and torsion of the torso.
The Miramare copy, made by Moritz Geiss’s Berlin factory, which specialised in copper-coated zinc castings, is faithful to the model even in the details of the diadem on the head and the helmet of Mars. The latter, a traditional attribute of the armed Venus, is crushed by the goddess’ left foot, a clear metaphorical allusion to love defeating war.
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