The Esquiline Venus

The so-called "Esquiline Venus", found in 1874 in the city of Rome, is a well preserved Claudian copy sculpture whose original dates back to the first century B. C. The life-size statue shows a naked young woman wearing only a pair of sandals and preparing herself for the bath. In the past, the statue was identified by Italian researcher Licinio Glori as a portrait statue of Cleopatra VII, lover of Caesar. This research opinion was confirmed by German scholar Bernard Andreae and Italian archaeologist Paolo Moreno, but until today the identification hypothesis remained controversial and was not accepted by most scholars.
In this short discussion of the statue shall be given a new approach to one of the most prominent marble works of the Capitoline Museums in Rome.

Stefan E. A. Wagner, born in 1989, studied Classical Archaeology, Prehistory and Christian Archaeology at the Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) in Germany.