This complete and virtually intact
group statuette
depicts the goddess Venus standing on
a two-
tiered integral base. Her garment is
draped
around her lower thighs and held in
place with
her left hand just to the side of her
pubic
triangle. The garment billows out
behind the legs
of the goddess in a form evocative of
a sea shell,
reminding all that Venus arose full-
grown from
the foam of the sea on the shores of
the
Mediterranean island of Cyprus. Her
hair is
elaborately coiffed and adorned with
a
headdress, cascading to her shoulders.
She holds
an apple in her raised right hand,
emblematic of
her first place in the beauty contest
judged by
Paris in which she defeated two other
goddesses.
She is flanked on one side by Eros,
who stands
on an integral base but one that is
separated
from that of Venus.
It is interesting to note the
profusion of
statuettes of Venus recovered from
Roman sites
in both Jordan and Syria. The
popularity of this
goddess in those areas is to be
understood as
the survival of the cult of the mother
goddess of
more remote times whose hold on the
area was
so iron-clad that it could not be
readily released.
That remote cult of the mother goddess
emphasized her characteristics of
fecundity
couched in terms of human, female
sexuality. By
the time of the Roman Imperial Period,
that
sexuality was transformed into the
most erotic
and salacious depictions of the
goddess.
The statuette discussed here is a
Roman copy of
a famed monumental statue created in
the
Hellenistic Period. That statue was
anciently
known as the
Venus Kallipigos, “Aphrodite of the
‘beautiful
behind.’” This original statue was
designed in
such a way that the curious visitor
would walk
around to the back of the statue only
to discover
that the shell-like shaped garment was
lower in
the back of the statue than it was in
the front,
thereby exposing the goddess’s
sensual
buttocks.
There is at least one monumental,
Roman copy
of the presumed Hellenistic original
upon which
this group statuette is based in the
collections of
the Museo Archeologico Regionale Paolo
Orsi in
Syracuse, Sicily. These two versions
differ from
the more canonical representations of
Aphrodite
Kallipigos, as seen in the Roman copy
in the
Farnese Collection. The Farnese
Aphrodite is
standing with her left arm raised on
high as she
cranes her neck backward to catch a
glimpse of
her own back side. The group statuette
under
discussion and its larger scale
parallel in
Syracuse avoid the sharp, backward
turn of the
head in favor of a forward looking
glance. In this
way, the spectator must take the
initiative to
move to the back of the representation
in order
to appreciate the nuances of the
composition
which develops in the round.
Dr. Robert Steven Bianchi
References:
Bianca Teolato Maiuri, Museo Nazionale
Napoli
(Novara 1971), page 43, figure 26, for
the
canonical image of Aphrodite
Kallipigos in a
Roman copy, found in the Domus Aurea,
or
Golden House, in Rome and presently in
the
Farnese Collection; and Paolo
Ciurcina, Syracuse.
Historical Town (Milan n.d), page 38
for a
monumental, Roman copy of the type
represented by the statuette under
discussion,
there misidentified as a copy of the
Venus
Anadyomene.
