Sloan nota: ideas in visuals and words

Torso Incognito

Hereby hangs a tale. A decade ago I downloaded a file, The Venus of Cnidos. Maybe she was an Aphrodite? I was already careful not to use copyrighted material so I’m confident that this was not. I’d never heard of her, a mere torso who once had a head, arms, legs. The slight bend in her torso was likable. In fact I’ve done about 250 versions of her in Aviary/Nodewerk back when that software still existed.

The problem is that I can’t find her anywhere online. Another statue entirely is given her name. And a copy of this known one exists with slightly different posture. (Some copy — change the pose?) All patched back together, leastways nearly all. I’ve tried matching my Venus with theirs — no way are the arms broken in the same places. So there’s no way someone’s glued the limbs back on my torso.

Let’s call her Venus Incognito. Here are some versions I’ve done in Aviary/Nodewerk (which also let you see some of what this amazing software could do). The very last example clearly comes from Photoshop, the background from textures.com.