KNIDIAN APHRODITE & TINTED VENUS: STATUES OF THE MONTH MARCH 2020

PREPARE TO BE SHOCKED: KNIDIAN APHRODITE & TINTED VENUS

STATUES OF THE MONTH: MARCH 2020

This month we’re going to look at a pair of nude statues - one Classical, one Victorian – depicting the goddess Aphrodite (aka Venus).  These statues are linked not just by their subject-matter, and by the likelihood that one was intended as a homage to the other, but by the impact they had when first exhibited, as they were both considered to be shocking and radical pieces of work.

Left: Roman copy of Praxiteles' 
Knidian Aphrodite, from Hadrian's 
Villa at Tivoli

Right: John Gibson's Tinted Venus,
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Praxiteles: Knidian Aphrodite

If you’ve ever studied an A-level or undergraduate module on Classical Sculpture, you’ll probably remember spending 90% of your course looking at sculptures of nude men (give or take the odd clothed statue of a charioteer).  In the last few weeks of the course, you begin to get the odd glimpse of female thigh (Scopas’s Raging Maenad) or the occasional breast slipping out while Nike zooms through the air at Olympia (think Barbara Windsor’s wardrobe malfunction in Carry on Camping).  Finally, you get to encounter the first completely nude life-size female statue in Greek art: Praxiteles’s Knidian Aphrodite, created c 340 BC.  Living as we do in a culture where the female nude has become a commonplace image in art and advertising, it’s difficult to imagine the impact that Praxiteles’s statue had on its 4^th century BC audience.

Like his Apollo Sauroktonos (Apollo the Lizard-Slayer, featured as February 2020’s Statue of the Month), Knidian Aphrodite features Praxiteles’s technique of ‘humanising the gods’ by showing them engaged in an everyday activity, in this case bathing.  Like the tree in Apollo Sauroktonos, Knidian Aphrodite also includes a built-in support to the left of the figure - Aphrodite’s dress cascading over a hydria (a water-jar).  Her long hair is bound up in a chignon, and her only accessory is an armlet around her left bicep.  This statue is based on a voyeuristic premise: that we’ve walked in on Aphrodite while she’s having a wash.  Voyeurism is a common theme in Greek mythology (Artemis and Actaeon) and anecdotal history (Herodotus’s story of Gyges and the Ring, probably best known to a modern audience through its appearance in the film The English Patient).  Our incursion into a private moment explains why Aphrodite is grabbing her dress and attempting to cover her crotch   with her hand.  But even though her body language implies embarrassment, the expression on her face is one of quiet amusement: was she half-expecting us?  As she’s not looking directly at the viewer, but slightly downwards and to her left, we have to walk round the statue in order to make eye-contact with her.

 

Left: Roman copy of Knidian Aphrodite, Glyptothek, Munich
Right: Plaster cast of Knidian Aphrodite, Royal Cast Collection, Copenhagen

This statue attracted a whole raft of stories in antiquity, including the explanation of the name by which it is still known. The citizens of Kos, who had originally commissioned the statue, were so shocked when they saw the finished product that they refused to accept it.  At this point another Greek city stepped in – Knidos, located on a peninsula further down the coast of Asia Minor – and offered to take the statue.  It has been suggested that the people of Knidos, as Dorians, had links with Sparta and were therefore less hung-up about female nudity than the residents of most ancient Greek states (as girls competed nude in Spartan athletic contests).  The people of Knidos realised that they had the potential to create a major tourist attraction: they created a purpose-built round temple in which to display the statue, and encouraged tourists from all over the Greek world to come and see it.   

Other stories quickly grew up around the statue.  It was said that Praxiteles’s model was his mistress Phryne, the top Athenian hetaira (a high-class courtesan, or highly-educated escort) of her day.  A young man supposedly became so besotted by the statue that he tried to make love to it, then committed suicide by throwing himself off a cliff, having left incriminating stains on the statue’s marble thighs.  A Hellenistic king offered to wipe out Knidos’ national debt in exchange for the statue (they refused).  The statue may even have helped to shape Greek mythology – the story of Pygmalion and Galataea can only be traced back as far as the 3^rd century BC, after this statue was made, suggesting that Praxiteles’s work may have inspired the story of the beautiful marble statue of a naked woman which comes to life (and of course makes a far superior wife to any of the real women that Pygmalion encounters).  

Given that Aphrodite is the personification of desire, the statue also gives us an insight into what was considered an attractive body-shape for women in 4^th century Athens. Aphrodite is curvy and voluptuous, but she’s also pear-shaped, as her breasts are smaller than her hips.  An ancient account of tourists’ reactions to the statue (pseudo-Lucian, Amores 13-14) suggests that the buttocks and the thighs were regarded as more important erogenous zones than the breasts: ‘Great flanks! What a handful to embrace! Look at the way the flesh of the buttocks … is not meanly drawn in too close to the bones, but not allowed to spread out in excessive fat’ (translation from Robin Osborne, Archaic & Classical Greek Sculpture, page 232).  This intentionally camp description of viewers’ responses to Knidian Aphrodite also emphasises that the statue was so sexy it would send anyone into ecstasies, regardless of their sexuality: ‘Such a Ganymede pours nectar sweetly for Zeus in heaven! For I would have received no drink if Hebe had been serving’.  It’s fascinating to see how references to the gods’ cupbearers Ganymede the Trojan prince and Hebe the goddess of youth could be used as a form of code to indicate someone’s sexual preferences.

Sadly, the original marble statue which inspired such excitement has long since disappeared, leaving us with rather pedestrian Roman copies which probably fail to capture the beauty of the original.  The most accurate surviving copy is probably the one which Hadrian commissioned for the grounds of his villa at Tivoli, near Rome.   

John Gibson: Tinted Venus

We’re now going to fast forward over two thousand years, to consider a Victorian statue which created almost as much of a stir as Praxiteles’s work.  John Gibson’s Tinted Venus (1851-56) forms the centrepiece of the Sculpture Room at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, displayed in its own purpose-built circular shrine – inspired, of course, by the circular shrine created for Knidian Aphrodite.  

Gibson’s statue also shows Aphrodite naked, interrupted while bathing or dressing.  Her dress hangs over her left arm, covering her crotch and providing additional support for the statue.  Her hair is swept up off her neck, held in place by a net.  Like Praxiteles’s work, she has jewellery: a golden armlet around her left arm and golden earrings which fall in tiny droplets.  Gibson, though, has added two items which weren’t present in Praxiteles’s work: a tortoise and an apple.  The tortoise can be found at the base of the statue, by Aphrodite’s left foot, and it’s inscribed with the Greek legend: ΓΙΒΣΩΝ ΕΠΟΙΕΙ ΕΝ ΡΩΜΗ: ‘Gibson made (me) in Rome’. 

The gilded apple which Aphrodite is holding in her left hand is the apple awarded to her by Paris, the same apple that was thrown onto the dance-floor at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis by the goddess Eris (Strife) – surely the ancestor of the Bad Fairy in ‘Sleeping Beauty’ – to cause competition amongst the goddesses.  The apple is inscribed in Greek with the words H KALH ΛΑΒΕΤΩ: ‘To be taken by the fairest’.   

Portrait of John Gibson by Sarah Mary Carpenter (Picture Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Before exploring the statue further, let’s have a quick look at John Gibson himself, as a fantastic British sculptor whose work deserves to be better known.  Although he was born near Conwy in North Wales, he spent his formative years in Liverpool, the result of an abortive attempt by his family to emigrate to America (apparently his mum put the kybosh on the idea at the last minute).  John became apprenticed to the Francey brothers, a Liverpool firm of monumental masons, which brought him to the attention of William Roscoe (yes, the man after whom ‘The Roscoe Head’ pub in Liverpool is named – a historian, poet, botanist and campaigner for the abolition of slavery within the British Empire).  Roscoe invited Gibson to use his library in order to learn more about art history.  In 1817, at the age of 27, Gibson went to Rome to learn from the acknowledged masters of his trade, Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen. The city became his home for the rest of his life and Gibson’s studio in the Via Fontanella became a popular stop for British tourists visiting Rome. Visitors reported that he was a bit eccentric; I love the rather acerbic comment by an American resident of Rome:    ‘He’s a god in his studio … but God help him outside it.’  He may have been gay, and it’s possible that he was in a relationship with another Welsh artist living in Rome, Penry Williams.  Gibson died in Rome in 1866 and he’s buried in the Protestant Cemetery there (along with lots of other interesting people, including Keats, Shelley, the Beat poet Gregory Corso and Andrea Camilleri, creator of Inspector Montalbano).  He left the contents of his studio to the Royal Academy in London, which periodically displays some of his drawings and plaster models.

One couple who visited Gibson’s Roman studio, a Mr & Mrs Preston from Liverpool, commissioned the Tinted Venus from him in 1851.  However, Gibson supposedly became so taken by the statue (a modern-day Pygmalion?) that he couldn’t bear to let it leave his studio, so it wasn’t exhibited until 1862.  When it finally went on show, it proved controversial because he’d added subtle colour to the marble, in line with the latest research which proved that Greek statues had originally been painted.  By the 1850s most Classical art historians accepted that Greek statues had been polychromatic, but this idea had yet to percolate through to the general public.   We now know that Gibson’s use of colour was actually pretty mild compared to the rather garish colour-schemes used on Classical Greek sculpture. The picture below, for example, shows a reconstruction of a section of the Parthenon, in the British Museum, with egg-yolk yellow and lashings of gold paint.  

                     Trojan archer from the East pediment of the Temple of Aphaia, Aegina.
                     Painted cast, reconstructing the original paint job, Glyptothek, Munich

Gibson’s goddess has blue eyes and blonde hair, loosely bound in a blue hairnet.  The pattern on the edge of her dress is picked out in red and blue paint, and the tortoise at her feet is also tinted in naturalistic shades of brown.  She’s considerably taller than the average Victorian woman, at 5 foot 10 inches, suggesting that Gibson deliberately employed the Classical convention of showing gods as taller than mortals.  She stands in the same relaxed pose as Praxiteles’s statue, with her weight on her left leg and her right heel raised off the ground. 

The statue made its debut at the London International Exhibition in South Kensington, displayed in a ‘temple’ specially designed for it by Owen Jones (author of an early design sourcebook, The Grammar of Ornament).  It was returned to the Preston family after the exhibition and eventually acquired by the Walker Art Gallery in 1971).  It wasn’t just the polychromy that shocked Victorian viewers, though, but the fact that the statue looked a bit too realistic, and a bit too, well … English – remember the blonde hair?  A reviewer in the Athenaeum magazine fulminated that Gibson had sculpted ‘a naked, impudent Englishwoman … with enough vulgarity in it to destroy all alluring power and every sign of the goddess.’ Gibson responded that ‘the human figure concealed under frock-coat and trousers is not a fit subject for sculpture’.  Other visitors were more enthusiastic about the statue, leading to commissions for two more Tinted Venuses.  

The Athenaeum reviewer’s suggestion that Gibson might have used an English model for his statue fascinated me so much that in 2019 I wrote a short story about Tinted Venus, which I’ve also posted as a separate item on this blog.  You might recognise the source of some of the dialogue from the biographical notes above! 

Where to See Gibson’s Work

John Gibson’s Tinted Venus still forms the centrepiece of the Sculpture Hall at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (completely free and well worth a visit, if you’ve never been).  Other works by Gibson can be found in many British museums and stately homes, including:

Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight:  Pandora (1856)

Chatsworth Sculpture Gallery:  Mars Restrained by Cupid  

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge:  Venus Verticordia  (essentially an earlier, uncoloured version of the Tinted Venus)

National Museum of Wales:  Phaeton Driving the Chariot of the Sun (relief by Gibson, c 1848); Aurora (free-standing statue, c 1842); Wounded Amazon (marble free-standing sculpture, c 1840)

Castle Museum, Norwich:  Meleager the Hunter (c 1847)

Left: Gibson's marble statue of Meleager the Hunter, in Norwich Castle Museum

Right: Gibson's plaster model for the same statue, part of his bequest to the Royal Academy