Venus and Cupid

Entry

The present statue of Venus shows the goddess in a standing pose, with her naked body partly covered by a draped cloth. She is accompanied by her young son Cupid, the god of love and desire, who reaches up to her. In 1963, Camp tentatively attributed the sandstone sculpture to the Frankfurt sculptor Cornelius Andreas Donett (1682-1748), based on several superficial stylistic similarities to two of the sculptor’s garden sculptures in the Stadtmuseum in Düsseldorf.¹ Donett’s figures are recognizable by the sharp bending of the free leg in combination with that of the opposite arm. The pose of the Amsterdam Venus displays a comparable contrapposto, albeit in a far less pronounced form. Her facial type and hair are rendered in a more schematic fashion than that of Donnett’s female figures, and her hanging drapery lacks the decorative interplay of folds that is characteristic of this sculptor.

Accordingly, there are no grounds to support the attribution to Donnett, nor any reason to suspect an origin outside the Netherlands. Stylistically, the present statue of Venus – which stood in the garden of Zwijnsbergen Castle near Helvoirt (North-Brabant) until circa 1910 – is highly akin to Dutch garden sculpture from the first quarter of the eighteenth century, in the transitional period between Rombout Verhulst (1624-1698) and Ignatius van Logteren (1685-1732). Cupid’s pose is a motif also found with Verhulst, including his Venus in the Amsterdam Town Hall, now the Royal Palace at Dam Square.² Also noteworthy is the similarity to the small Diana standing in the garden of the Bartolotti House (170 Herengracht, Amsterdam), a work by the Antwerp sculptor Albert Xavery (c. 1660-after 1720), who moved to The Hague in 1690.³ Both sculptures share commonalities in pose, the proportions of their respective pear-shaped bodies, and the motif of the hanging cloth between the legs. The sensuality of Venus’s body, the treatment of the drapery folds and the fairly schematic rendering of the body also recall works by the Antwerp sculptor Jan Pieter Baurscheit I (1669-1728) and his workshop. So far, however, it has not been possible to identify other sculptures in Dutch garden statuary that display the distinctive style of the Rijksmuseum Venus. Its maker must therefore possibly be sought among (the circle of) the lesser-known sculptors from the generation succeeding Verhulst, such as Jan Blommendael (1636-1707), Pieter van der Plas (1655-1708), Jan Ebbelaer (c. 1666-1706) or Anthonie Turck (c. 1668-1725).⁴

Bieke van der Mark and Frits Scholten, 2025