The Venus Tauride or Venus of Tauris is a 1.67 m high sculpture of Aphrodite. It is named after the Tauride (Tavrichesky) Palace in St Petersburg, where it was kept from the end of the eighteenth century until the mid-nineteenth. It is now in the Hermitage Museum. It was ceded by Pope Clement XI to Peter I in Rome in 1718, after protracted diplomatic negotiations, and (on its arrival in Russia two years later) was the first classical sculpture to be seen in that country.