Dido, Queen of Carthage

In 1785 Giovanni Volpato established a manufactory in Rome for the production of biscuit-porcelain sculpture. This group personifying the river Nile was the most ambitious work made at Volpato's factory, as well as the most expensive, as shown by a surviving price list. Most of the sculptural groups made under Volpato's supervision were reproductions of antique marbles, the biscuit-porcelain medium being ideally suited to this purpose. 

The River Nile is a reduction of a colossal Roman marble at the Vatican, much admired in Volpato's time, and is remarkably faithful to the marble original; only the base has been simplified, as was required by the change in scale. The composition is an allegory of fecundity. A cornucopia is placed prominently near the reclining Nile, and the sixteen small children who cavort on and about the figure of the river symbolize the sixteen units of measurement, known as cubits, by which the river rose annually, fertilizing the surrounding areas. 

The complexity of the composition, due in large part to the incorporation of the children, accounted for the high price of the biscuit group, of which this is the only known example.

This is the largest and most complete copy of the cult statue of the Aphrodite of Aphrodisias, the image of the goddess created in the Hellenistic period for the sanctuary. It marks the point at which an earlier local fertility goddess was identified with the Aphrodite of the Hellenic pantheon. The statue stands stiffly and frontally, like an old Anatolian goddess, and was designed to recall that earlier identity of the goddess now subsumed in Aphrodite. The figure wears a tall headdress and veil and a thin dress covered by thick hard cladding. The cladding is divided into a chest area and four lower decorated zones. Each of these four zone contains figured decoration that concerns different aspects of Aphrodite: (1) three Graces, her handmaids; (2) Selene (Moon) and Helios (Sun), the permanent temporal extent of her realm; (3) Aphrodite in classical form on a sea-goat with tritons; and (4) three winged Erotes, her children and agents, involved in sacrifice. The iconography of the statue was designed to combine the archaic aspects of the old local goddess with ideas of the Classical and Hellenistic Aphrodite.