The earliest incontrovertible record of the marble original, now in the Museo Nazionale in Naples, is in a print in Giovanni Battista Cavalieri's volume on the antiquities of Rome of 1594 (loc. cit.), by which time it was already in the Farnese collection. It could be the Venus recorded by Ulisse Aldrovandi in Palazzo Farnese in the 1550's (loc. cit.), which he described as holding a towel having just emerged from the bath, and it is not impossible that some of the bronze reductions of it date from as early as the 16th century. Distinguished early examples include the related statuettes in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (Penny, loc. cit.) and the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Braunschweig (Berger and Krahn, loc. cit.). The present bronze, with its finely finished hair and gilt fillet, probably dates from the 17th century, and certainly from before 1786, when the marble's appearance was modified by the sculptor and restorer Carlo Albacini prior to its removal from Rome to Capodimonte in Naples (Haskell and Penny, op. cit., p. 316). Although it is now generally assumed that the figure represents Venus, it was popularly associated with a story told by the ancient author, Athenaeus, concerning the two daughters of a peasant who decided to settle a disagreement as to which of them had the comlier buttocks by revealing them to a passing stranger. He married his choice, and his brother subsequently wed the other sister. The statue's history and influence have been extensively studied by Säflund (op. cit.).
This lot is accompanied by a thermoluminescence report from the Oxford Research Laboratory, which shows the core to have been last fired between 200 and 400 years ago.