Upon his first encounter with the ancient marble known as the Leconfield Head, the archaeologist Adolf Furtwängler admitted to being 'absolutely enraptured by its beauty'. It was Furtwängler who, in 1888, proposed the head as the work of the celebrated classical Greek sculptor Praxiteles, an attribution which has since been revised in favour of a slightly later dating, around 300 BC. A variant of Praxiteles' Aphrodite of Knidos type, the over-life-size head was almost certainly fragmented from a large statue of the goddess. It was acquired by Charles Wyndham, 2nd Earl of Egremont (1710-1763) in the 1750s, sourced in Rome through either Gavin Hamilton in 1755, or Matthew Brettingham, who is recorded to have to have purchased an 'antique marble head of Venus' from Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (1716-1799) in 1753. The head's name derives from its subsequent owners, the Barons of Leconfield at Petworth House in Sussex, where the marble remains as part of the National Trust (inv. no. 486379).

The nose and upper lip of the Leconfield Head are restorations which probably date to the 1870s. A plaster cast in the Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris, discussed by Andrew Stewart in 1977 (op. cit.), provides a valuable record of the head’s earlier restoration, with a noticeably broader nose, which it still retained when engravings of it were made in the early 19th century. It was presumed by Stewart that the head was first restored shortly before its sale to Charles Wyndham in the 1750s. If indeed the head is the one bought from Cavaceppi, this famous restorer of antiquities would be a likely candidate to have carried out this work.

The present, beautifully carved bust is a rare and early copy of the Leconfield Aphrodite. It is of particular interest as its features clearly correspond to the head’s pre-19th century restoration, while its style suggests that the ancient marble may have had an earlier history in late Baroque Rome. Though largely faithful to its model, it is an adaptation rather than a true copy, with more tightly arranged and partially drilled curls of hair, a livelier turn of the neck, and the addition of delicate drapery below the neck. Stylistically the present bust is consistent with Italian sculpture around 1700, and it bears a striking resemblance to the work of the French-born Roman sculptor Pierre-Étienne Monnot (1657-1733), whose female figures exhibit a similar facial type, with broad, slightly retroussé noses and small pursed lips, as well as drilling in the hair. Compare, in particular, the figure of Fortitude in Monnot’s Monument to Innocent XI in St Peter’s Basilica, and the Virgin in his reliefs for the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, both dated to the final decade of the 17th century (see Enggass, op. cit., figs. 22-26). Tantalisingly, Monnot is known to have engaged in the restoration of antiquities in Rome, and Cavaceppi was his most prominent pupil. Assuming that the sculptor of the present bust is likely to have also been responsible for the initial restoration of the ancient head’s nose and upper lip, it is tempting to propose that the Leconfield Aphrodite may have been restored by Monnot, or a sculptor from his circle, in the late 17th or early 18th century.

RELATED LITERATURE

R. Enggass, Early Eighteenth-Century Sculpture in Rome, University Park and London, 1976; A. Stewart, 'A Cast of the Leconfield Head in Paris', in Revue Archéologique, 1977, pp. 195-202; A. Pasquier and J.-L. Martinez (eds.), Praxitèle, exh. cat. Musée du Louvre, 2007, pp. 116-117, no. 18; http://www.nationaltrustcollects ions.org.uk/object/486379