In 1914, in the middle of London’s National Gallery, the suffragette Mary Richardson took a meat cleaver to Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (c 1647-51) and struck the painted goddess at least three times. Asked afterwards why, she gave an answer that still hangs over every nude in every museum: “I didn’t like the way men visitors gaped at it all day long.” Thirty-four years earlier, in 1880, a shocked Mark Twain had called Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1534) “the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses”. Both outrages, as Matthew Wilson recounts in BBC Culture, were aimed at the same deity: Aphrodite, to the Romans Venus, the most argued-over body in the history of art.
Two births on one island
Neither of her origin stories marks her as a future troublemaker. In myth, Kronos castrates his father Ouranos and flings the genitals into the sea; foam rises, and from it steps Aphrodite, fully formed, gliding over the waves to Cyprus, where flowers bloom beneath her feet. The history is less operatic and more interesting: she emerged as a deity on Cyprus around 1200BC, carrying traits apparently inherited from older Middle Eastern goddesses — Ishtar, Astarte, Hathor. “Sexuality, love and fertility were their core characteristics,” says Anja Ulbrich, curator of an exhibition on the goddess at Oxford’s Ashmolean, “but they all had more than one function.”
So did Aphrodite. She governed not just romance but all physical love and procreation, in animals and plants as much as humans. She fought in the Trojan War, and ancient Greek navies worshipped her for it. Through her affair with the Trojan prince Anchises she became mother of Aeneas, whose descendants were said to found Rome — which makes her, on one telling, the mother of an empire. Her reach was her popularity.
One of her names is Pandemos: the goddess of all people. It’s not just the warriors, or the women: love affects everybody and everything. It pervades life.
The statue that changed the pose
For several hundred years nobody sculpted her nude, or much differently from the other Olympian goddesses. Then, around 350BC, Praxiteles made the Aphrodite of Knidos — the first completely nude female figure in ancient Greek art. The original is lost; Rome’s copyists preserved its likeness, most famously in the Capitoline Venus (c 160BC). Male nudity was nothing new: celebrating the undressed male body had been normal, Ulbrich notes, from the 7th or 6th Century BC. Praxiteles simply extended the honour to female beauty. But not in the same way.
Look closely and the body language is wholly different. The Greek male nude stands confident and heroic. Praxiteles’s Aphrodite is caught bathing — shy, vulnerable, covering herself in shame or embarrassment, a presentation Ulbrich traces to the myths, “where she is constantly bathing and working on her physical beauty.” Yet her hands are held slightly away from her body, so that a viewer who circles the marble is rewarded for the walk. The sculpture invites interaction. It flatters sensual curiosity. Centuries later this stance acquired a name: the Venus Pudica, the modest — or shamed — Venus.
Ulbrich calls the Knidos “revolutionary”. Before it, you identified Aphrodite by her dress, her jewellery, her attributes; afterwards, “the nudity basically takes over.” It is worth being precise about where the scandal lay. A naked body is natural and innocent in itself. What made Aphrodite provocative was not undress but arrangement — a body posed for a viewer’s gratification, turned into an object of lust. Roman sculptors copied the figure in the thousands and carried the pose everywhere the empire reached: Europe, North Africa, the Middle East.
Rebirth and revolt
The Renaissance, hunting classical models with a greed not seen for a millennium, found the Venus Pudica irresistible. Masaccio, Botticelli, Raphael and Titian reincarnated her; some used the pose for the goddess herself, many more for other female figures, and others devised fresh poses on the same premise of diffident nudity. Rubens and Velázquez repeated it in the Baroque, Cabanel and Manet in the 1800s, Modigliani and Yves Klein in the 20th Century. Through this endless reworking, the objectified female form became a load-bearing wall of the art-historical canon. Twain’s disgust and Richardson’s cleaver were replies to that long lineage — the ruled, in their different centuries, talking back to the image.
Ulbrich insists Praxiteles should not have the last word. The goddess has been depicted in countless ways, and the Ashmolean exhibition shows it. One exhibit, made in Northumberland — a long grey way from the Mediterranean — shows Aphrodite bathing. There, Ulbrich says with a smile, “she looks pretty annoyed by the cold.”
Outside Praxiteles’s shadow she is cast again and again, lately even as an emblem of empowerment. In 2023 Beyoncé opened a concert rising from a giant clam shell in a dress decorated with Venus Pudica hands; Björk, Lady Gaga, Kylie Minogue and Bananarama have all written songs about her. Three thousand years and counting is a remarkable run for any deity, and there is something astonishing in the thought that a single lost statue bent the world’s attitudes to nudity this decisively. The controversy will not subside, because beauty and its handling are never settled business. “Depending on the context, people have just narrowed her down to what they need and what they want,” says Ulbrich. “She is very versatile, you know.”