Esquiline Venus
| The Esquiline Venus | |
|---|---|
| Artist | Anon. |
| Year | c. 50 AD |
| Type | White marble |
| Location | Capitoline Museums, Rome |
The Esquiline Venus is a smaller-than-life-size Roman nude marble sculpture of a female in sandals and a diadem headdress. There is no definitive scholarly consensus on either its provenience or its subject. It is widely viewed as a 1st-century CE Roman copy (i.e. an interpretatio graeca) of a Hellenistic original from the 1st-century BCE Ptolemaic Kingdom, commissioned by emperor Claudius to decorate the Horti Lamiani.
The figure may depict the Ptolemaic ruler Cleopatra VII; it may also have been intended to represent the Roman-Egyptian syncretic deity Venus-Isis.
A vase next to the nude figure includes an asp or uraeus and depictions of the Egyptian cobra, symbols which support the Cleopatra interpretation.