The 445-year-old marble has journeyed far, lost fingers and been buried. Now, with help from TEFAF, the goddess of love has been restored to glory.
It was two weeks before Valentine’s Day, and divine intervention seemed to be made literal for a moment: Venus herself slowly descended from above, flanked as always by her two adoring attendants. She was temporarily enshrouded in protective padding, adding a layer of mystery. White Shiva Statue
The Roman goddess of love and her companions, all 6,000 pounds of them, had been sculpted in marble by the French Flemish artist Pietro Francavilla in 1579.
The lowering into place of the work, titled “Venus with a Nymph and Satyr” at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, came courtesy of a chain pull attached to a huge gantry. The platform was surrounded by a dozen people who were eager to get the sculpture’s placement right.
“That’s pretty good,” said the Wadsworth’s director, Matthew Hargraves, when the sculpture looked to be well situated on its base atop a basin that will soon be filled with water once again. “Venus” was originally created as a fountain, with water spouting out of the carved dolphins below the nymph and satyr.
The work had not been operational as a fountain since 2010. In addition to plumbing repairs, it needed a cleaning and other fixes, which it recently received, in part because of 25,000 euros (around $26,983) from the TEFAF Museum Restoration Fund, donated by the European Fine Art Foundation.
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