Two Aphrodites, one choice
Pliny the Elder tells the story. Praxiteles made two statues of Aphrodite and offered them at the same price: one draped, one nude. The people of Kos, who had the choice, took the draped one out of propriety. The people of Knidos took the nude one, and it made their city famous. People sailed to Knidos just to see it. When King Nicomedes later offered to pay the city’s entire public debt in exchange for the statue, the Knidians refused.
The goddess stood in a small temple open on all sides, so she could be seen from every angle, and Pliny says that from whatever side she was viewed she was equally admirable.
Why it mattered
Before the Knidian Aphrodite, Greek sculptors had shown the female figure clothed, goddesses included. Praxiteles broke one of the most stubborn conventions in Greek art. Pliny does mention an earlier naked Venus by Skopas in Rome, but it was the Knidian statue that everyone remembered, and its slender proportions and distinctive contrapposto became hallmarks of fourth-century sculpture. It is widely described as the origin of the female nude in Western art.
What did she look like?
The goddess stood with her right hand covering her body and her left hand holding a garment draped over a vase at her side. The marble came from Paros, and the finish was coloured, probably by the painter Nikias, to bring out her gaze and the softness of the flesh. Her hair, parted in the middle, fell in long waves to a knot at the nape; her face mixed Classical balance with a softer gaze, rounded cheeks and full lips. Was she a likeness of the courtesan Phryne, or an ideal beyond any model? The question has been asked for a long time.
Two hundred copies, two personalities
The statue’s fame grew in the Hellenistic age and grew further under Rome. Almost 200 representations are known today: copies and statuettes in marble, bronze, silver, glass and terracotta, coins and reliefs. They do not agree on every detail. One group, best represented by the Colonna Venus in the Vatican, shows a calm, poised goddess; another, typified by the Venus Belvedere, shows a woman on her guard, anxious about being seen. Some specialists think the Colonna type is closest to Praxiteles; others, comparing the coins of Knidos, prefer the Belvedere type. The original’s exact look remains open.
The type went on generating new goddesses. The nude or half-nude Aphrodite became one of the most popular images of the Hellenistic world, and the Venus de Milo, two centuries later, belongs to the same tradition.
Where to see it
The original is lost. The Colonna Venus is in the Museo Pio-Clementino of the Vatican Museums; the Louvre has the Kaufmann Head and the Metropolitan Museum a full statue of the type. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 36.20-22 and 36.26, trans. J. Bostock and H. T. Riley (Perseus Digital Library).
- Musée du Louvre, Praxitèle exhibition (2007), “The Aphrodite of Cnidus, and nude figures of Aphrodite”; “Praxitelizing female nudes”.
- Vatican Museums, catalogue MV.812.0.0, “Venere Colonna”; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 52.11.5 and “The Art of Classical Greece” (2008).
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