Nevertheless, Greek men did get one thing right: They understood that a woman’s sex drive could equal their own and that a woman’s pleasure in sex was equal as well. One myth had it that women enjoyed sex not merely as much as men but ten times more. Explicit vase paintings show what must be married couples having sex, and the woman is clearly enjoying herself. In Lysistrata by Aristophanes the women of Athens refuse to have sex with their husbands until the men negotiate peace with Sparta. This strategy would make no sense, nor would the play make sense to its all-male Greek audience, if men in Athens could just as easily and with no social opprobrium get sex from boys or from prostitutes instead of from their wives. Much is made among the women in the play about how difficult their own lives will be without sex. And the women prevail as the play ends with a peace between the two cities.
Surely not all of this is male fantasy. It must have been common enough for Greek married couples to enjoy their lives together and for the women to find emotionally richer lives than the bare circumstances of their existence might imply. And in some cases, we cannot know whether it was in many or few, the moment must have arrived when the former frightened fourteen-year-old bride matured and began to understand and use the power that flowed from her sexuality. Aphrodite was the goddess of that power.
The nude goddess
FROM ITS distant beginnings and for centuries afterward, Greek sculpture showed men nude and women clothed. Men’s genitals were rendered in accurate detail, their pubes delicately carved in a style that changed from era to era. Even herms had erect phalluses halfway down the otherwise bare pillar. Occasionally a large statue might reveal a woman’s breast, but no statues revealed a woman’s pubic area. We don’t know why. The reasons were so obvious to the Greeks that in the writing that remains to us no one saw any need to comment on it. It could not have been the result of prudery in Greek art. Greek vase painting showed nude women, often in lascivious poses, but vases were used in private, and most statues were displayed in public. Perhaps the reason is simply that male public nudity was common and female public nudity was not. Athletes competed entirely in the nude, whether in the Olympic games or in friendly contests at local gymnasiums, and all athletes were male, except in Sparta, where lightly clothed women competed. Outside Sparta even a glimpse of a woman’s leg was rare. A woman who exposed herself would shock and scandalize a community.
In time sculptors who wanted to show a woman’s body came to circumvent this convention by showing women covered by wet drapery. These statues preserved public decency while the appearance of cloth clinging to flesh gave them an erotic charge. Then, around 350 B.C., Praxiteles of Athens, in an act that combined inspiration, genius, and audacity, invented the female nude in sculpture. In that moment he changed Western art forever.
The people of Kos, an island near the southern coast of Turkey, commissioned Praxiteles to make a statue of Aphrodite. He created two, one draped and the other nude. On Kos the people made the sober and proper choice of the draped statue, a work that seems to have immediately faded into obscurity. The people of Knidos, a city near Kos on a long, narrow peninsula that projects for miles into the Aegean from southwest Turkey, elected to buy the nude statue. It was an immediate sensation. The statue drew travelers from around the known world to Knidos, an obscure seaport until then, where the statue was first displayed in an open circular shrine so that it could be seen from every angle. One can imagine craftsmen outside the shrine selling replicas to the tourists just as the Louvre sells replicas of the Venus de Milo. The Aphrodite was such a lucrative attraction that later, when a wealthy king offered to pay the city’s enormous debt in return for the statue, Knidos refused.
The Aphrodite of Knidos survived until A.D. 476. By then it had been moved to Constantinople, the capital of the eastern Roman empire, where it was destroyed by fire. But the many copies that remain, as well as coins from Knidos with the statue’s image, give a reasonable idea of her appearance. Life-sized or somewhat larger, the goddess is standing with most of her weight on her right leg. Her left knee is bent slightly inward. This uneven distribution of weight—known as contrapposto—was one of the great innovations of Greek art. It creates dynamic curves as well as dramatic motion. At the same time the statue seems more natural, since it is easier to stand this way than rigidly with the weight divided equally on both legs.
Beside the goddess is a large urn that holds water for her bath. In her left hand she holds the robe she has just removed. She looks slightly to her left as her right hand hovers in front of her pubic area, which has the effect of both concealing and emphasizing it.
After the nudity, the position of the right hand was the most provocative element of the statue and has endured in Western art through the centuries. The Italian Renaissance artist Masaccio repeats it in his Expulsion, where Adam’s genitals are exposed, as in ancient Greece, but Eve covers hers with her hand. Recently this pose, known as the pudica gesture, has become a subject of much discussion by feminist critics trying to explain why the Greeks showed males as unashamed of their genitals while the Aphrodite of Knidos covers hers. As Nanette Salomon writes in a collection called Naked Truths, devoted to this and similar problems in classical art, “Woman, thus fashioned, is reduced in a humiliated way to her sexuality. The immediate and long-term implications of this fiction in the visual arts are incalculable.” She may have a point about some Greek works of art, but not this one. Without the actual statue for reference we have no way of being certain how she was represented, but in the copies and coins that remain she appears to be anything but humiliated. On the contrary, she is serene and confident.
The belief was that a mortal seeing a goddess nude would instantly be incinerated by her glory. Perhaps, as Christine Mitchell Havelock, another contemporary critic, has suggested, the goddess is trying to keep the mortal viewer from harm and to protect the source of her divine authority. “I question,” Havelock concludes, “whether [the viewer in Greek times] was expected to feel privileged to have chanced upon a naked woman at her private bath.”
But there is no doubt that the fame of the statue was due to its erotic charge, which derived from the beauty of the statue, from the tantalizing pudica pose, and from its flouting of convention. One pathetic admirer hid in the shrine overnight, and the statue, Pliny says, “thus bears a stain, an indication of his lust.” Lucian (or perhaps it was a later writer whom scholars call the Pseudo-Lucian) traveled to Knidos to see the statue. By then it was no longer displayed in an open shrine but in a temple with one door for seeing her from the front and another for seeing her from behind. That way, presumably, admission could be charged twice. Lucian says that in seeing her he was seized by “unforeseen amazement.” She had “a look of proud contempt and a slight smile which just reveal[ed] her teeth.” A poem from the time has Aphrodite herself coming across the sea to Knidos. After gazing at the statue from every angle, she demands, “Where did Praxiteles see me naked?”
Of course, from prehistoric times there had been images of fertility goddesses that embodied a female principal. Among the Greeks there had been other statues of Aphrodite and many of other goddesses. These statues, however, even the ones with wet drapery, were seldom entirely concerned with a woman’s sexuality. As only the greatest art can do, the Aphrodite of Knidos seemed to arrive entirely without warning and changed everything that came afterward. Praxiteles had made mere stone show the Greeks a living force.
Roman taste
AFTER this startling departure by Praxiteles, statues of Aphrodite appeared frequently in a variety of poses. Generally she was nude, but when there was drapery, it was intended to enhance the statue’s sensuality by what little it concealed. Scholars have given most of these poses specific and highly descriptive names, including Aphrodite Kallipygos, which means Aphrodite of the beautiful buttocks.
Four principal poses were repeated endlessly in large sculpture for public display, as well as in smaller figures for votive purposes or for household decoratio
n. One type, the Sandal-Binding Aphrodite, shows her balanced on one leg, with the other crooked across her knee so she can readjust her sandal. The sexual wattage seems a little lower to us in this pose than in the others. That may have been true then as well, or perhaps for Greek males, seeing a woman fiddle with her sandal was an illicit pleasure like a glimpse of lingerie. The second type is the Aphrodite Anadyomene. Here she has just risen from the sea or from her bath and is twisting her long hair to wring out the water. A painting by Apelles, whom the Greeks considered their greatest painter, may have inspired this pose. We know nothing of this work (which, like his others, has not survived) except that its beautiful rendering of the goddess’s nudity made it famous and exciting in the manner of Praxiteles’s statue.
Less common and more provocative, although the pose is concealing, is the Crouching Venus. She is bent down until her buttocks rest on the back of her ankle. Her body is bent slightly forward and twisted, causing rows of wrinkles across her stomach. This pose looks forced and improbable to us, but in reality she is simply having a bath. Greeks bathed by kneeling down while someone, a slave perhaps, poured water over them from a large jar. Just as the jar at the side of the Aphrodite of Knidos implied that she had just bathed or was about to bathe, the crouching pose implies bathing and gives a rationale for the goddess’s nudity.
The last common pose is that of the Venus de Milo. There are several other statues in a similar pose—the Venus of Arles in the Louvre and the Venus de Capua in the Archeological Museum in Naples, to name two. They all seem to be from the same era and probably derived from an earlier statue, now unknown and lost. The goddess is nude from the waist up. She is standing with most of her weight on one leg while the other is slightly elevated and resting on a step or stone. In some versions she is holding a mirror or a polished shield and gazes at the beauty of her reflection. That would account for her nudity—she has let down her gown so she can see all her glory—and also gives a reason for her blank and distant stare. This is why some scholars proposed reconstructions of the Venus de Milo holding a shield supported by her left leg, although there is no sign of any disturbance on the drapery of her left thigh where a shield would have to have rested.
This pose became especially popular after about 150 B.C., a curious and unexpected moment in the history of Greek art. It was both the height of the Hellenistic age and the beginning of its end. After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. his generals had carved up his empire into separate kingdoms. In 150 B.C. these kingdoms still dominated the eastern Mediterranean. However, once Rome had finally defeated Carthage, Romans and Roman power began arriving from the west and would in time conquer the Hellenistic kingdoms one by one. The last to fall was Egypt, when Octavian defeated Anthony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium in 31 B.C.
Hellenistic art, though still Greek, had not produced any renowned artists, as the classical period had, and Hellenistic sculptors chose subjects that would never have been considered by Phidias, Myron, or their peers: old women with wrinkles, old men with potbellies, savage Gauls in the throes of death, boxers after a fight sitting swollen, scarred, and exhausted. (Pliny, writing around A.D. 100, dismissed all Hellenistic art as inferior, a judgment that held almost until modern times. Certainly that was the accepted opinion in France in 1821 when its scholars were so desperate to place the Venus de Milo among classical statues and not in the degraded Hellenistic age.) But around 150 B.C. there was a change of taste in the Hellenistic world, a reaction against the new subjects and styles. Some of this change may have been due to a growing influx of Romans, who were enamored of classical Greece and wanted art in that manner. They commissioned copies of ancient statues, as Romans would continue to do throughout the empire, but they also wanted new works in the classical manner, and a retro style imitating classical sculpture became fashionable.
Gods and goddesses reappeared amid the potbellies and scarred fighters. Inevitably, copies of the Aphrodite of Knidos and of Aphrodites in the different poses it inspired began to reappear throughout the eastern Mediterranean. One of these was the Venus de Milo. It was carved in conscious imitation of the classical manner. When the French scholars in the nineteenth century insisted that the statue was from the classical period and not the Hellenistic era, there was enough ambiguity in style to make their case plausible. The sculptor himself hadn’t wanted his statue to look Hellenistic.
Contrary to the general opinion
BUT IT DOES. The pose, with drapery wrapped around the hips and legs, which was rare before 150 B.C. but popular afterward, is the most obvious sign. Other statues in this pose can be dated by inscriptions or the context of where they were found, and the similarities between them and the Venus de Milo make it clear that she is their contemporary—though whether the Venus de Milo or the Venus of Arles or the Venus de Capua or another statue entirely was the first of this type is impossible to tell.
This form was appealing because the drapery around the hips was a concession to modesty that helped avoid the problems full nudity might provoke even two hundred years after the Aphrodite of Knidos. But there were both aesthetic and structural reasons for the drapery. The human body is an aggravating shape for sculptors. The head, fairly large, sits above a massive torso, but the massive torso sits on human legs, which tend to be two rather spindly supports. Wrapping the legs in drapery adds weight and solidity to the bottom of the figure and gives a stable and appealing support for the torso above.
The statue also reveals its Hellenistic origins by exhibiting two different styles, a fact that some critics have used against it. The torso is that of a beautiful woman, but it is realistic rather than ideal. The hips are thick and wide, and the stomach—“Immense like the sea,” as Rodin said—is huge. This realism is akin to the realism that defined so much of Hellenistic art: the scars on the face of a boxer, the sagging flesh of an elderly man. The head, however is classical, inspired by Praxiteles’s Aphrodite of Knidos, and even in the body there are bows here and there to the classical rules of proportion. The distance between the tips of the breasts—twenty-eight centimeters—is the same as the distance from the tip of the right breast to the navel and the same as the distance from the navel to the place beneath the drapery that would be the lowest point of the groin. It is this mixture of classical idealism with realism, which appeared during the Hellenistic era and not before, that to the practiced eye, unprejudiced by political necessities, reveals the statue’s late date.
No one today challenges the dating to the Hellenistic era, not even the French. In 1951 Jean Charbonneaux, then the conservator of Greek and Roman antiquities at the Louvre, calmly wrote, “Beginning in 1893, contrary to the general opinion, Furtwängler had set 150 and 50 B.C. as the limits of the period where [the statue] belonged.” Here we have evidence of Furtwängler’s triumph, posthumous but complete, over Ravaisson, Reinach, and the rest of the French who so desperately wanted the statue to be from the classical age. By 1951 even an official at the Louvre could dismiss the impassioned work of his countrymen with the phrase “contrary to the general opinion.”
There is one final piece of evidence for dating the Venus de Milo to Hellenistic times. It is conclusive, and Furtwängler was correct here as well. That evidence is the broken base inscribed with the name of the sculptor from Antioch. Quatremère de Quincy, Félix Ravaisson, and Salomon Reinach aside, that broken base did belong to the statue. To see why, we must return to the scene of the discovery and, step by step, reconstruct the Venus de Milo, arms and all, as it appeared when it was first displayed.
A poet and sculptor from Antioch
THE STATUE was discovered in a niche with an arched entrance and an arched ceiling. A few years later, as we have seen, a Dutch trader discovered two more identical niches in the same ancient wall, each holding the remains of a statue. The three niches were twenty paces apart from one another. Greek gymnasiums had walls built just this way, with regularly spaced niches to hold statues.
By the Helleni
stic age gymnasiums throughout the Greek world were places for athletic training as well as private preparatory schools for boys. In that regard they were rather like the gymnasiums of nineteenth-century Germany—which had been created after the Greek model—where Furtwängler’s father was a headmaster. Surviving inscriptions show that there were footraces, races in armor, races with torches, wrestling, and boxing, among other contests, all divided into divisions for boys, young men, and men. For boys and young men there were also competitions in music composition, lyre playing, singing, painting, and arithmetic.
The teachers, like sculptors, had the social status of tradesmen, but the gymnasiarch, equivalent to a modern headmaster, was a wealthy man with great prestige and great obligations. He was supposed to endow funds for the proper religious sacrifices, for prizes in contests, and for keeping the buildings of the gymnasium in good repair. In small or remote communities like Melos he might even double as a sort of magistrate for the town.
Gymnasiums all looked much the same. There was a large, open rectangular area in the center known as the palaestra, where the sports and games took place. A covered colonnade ran beside the palaestra. Here men could lounge and watch the athletes, or the young students could attend their classes.
Behind the colonnade were walls with niches at regular intervals for statues, which might be of gods or goddesses, of mythical heroes, or even of local heroes who had triumphed in the various competitions. Every gymnasium had statues that honored Hermes and Hercules, the patrons of gymnasiums, and, beginning in the second century B.C., Venus. This was the start of a tradition that would continue to expand among the Romans, who honored Venus as the patroness of places for contests and spectacles.
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