The Venus was taken from Rome to Florence in 1677, and apart from the period from 1803 until 1815 when it was in Paris, it has remained in Florence, in the Tribune of the Uffizi, at least since 1688. Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, pages 325-8, provides references for some of the eulogies it received and for the subsequent decline in its reputation.
For Wincklemann in 1764 the Venus resembles:
a rose which, after a lovely dawn, unfolds its leaves to the rising sun; resembles one who is passing from an age which is hard and somewhat harsh - like fruits before their perfect ripeness - into another, in which all the vessels of the animal system are beginning to dilate, and the breasts to enlarge, as her bosom indicates, - which in fact is more developed than usual in tender maidens. ( Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art, IV, II)
In Zoffany's painting of the Tribuna degli Uffizi of 1772/8, commissioned by Queen Charlotte, and now in the Royal Collection, the Venus is admired by one group, one of them using an eyeglass for more detailed study. Titian 's Venus of Urbino is at the centre of another group, while Zoffany himself holds up the 'Niccolini-Cowper' Madonna and Child by Raphael.
Reynolds, 1780, in Discourse Ten cites the Venus as an example of perfect beauty ( Reynolds, Discourses, p. 177).
Byron 's Childe Harold, of 1817, Canto IV, stanzas xlix-liii, on the Venus, begin:
There, too, the Goddess loves in stone, and fills
The air around with beauty - we inhale
The ambrosial aspect, which, beheld, instils
Part of its immortality - the veil
Of heaven is half undrawn - within the pale
We stand, and in that form and face behold
What Mind can make, when Nature's self would fail;
And to the fond Idolaters of old
Envy the innate flash which such a Soul could mould.
( Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto IV, Stanza xlix in Byron, The Poetical Works.)
Ruskin 's early praise of the Venus is in a similar vein. He comments in Letters to a College Friend that casts of the Venus make her 'a foolish little schoolgirl' but the statue itself 'is one of the most elevated incarnations of a woman conceivable ( Works, 1.433). However in a letter to his father of 15 June 1845 Ruskin says of the Venus that 'it gives me no pleasure whatever', and this comment was perhaps closer to the prevailing view in the 1840s than his earlier praise.
Hazlitt, writing about the Venus de' Medici in 1826, refers to its 'timid grace' and 'faultless sweetness'. He contrasts its 'negative perfection' with the Apollo Belvedere, which he sees as 'positively bad' ( Hazlitt, Notes of a Journey through France and Italy, p. 222, and see Hazlitt on the Belvedere Apollo and the Venus de' Medici).
In 1975 Robertson wrote in the context of the Venus de' Medici:
The dull copies, restored and worked over (a version of the Medici in New York is better in these respects) of statues adapted by conventional minds from a creation of great originality, are for us among the most charmless remnants of antiquity. ( Robertson, A History of Greek Art, p.549).
See Ruskin and the Italian School.