Aphrodite review – a trashy way to treat the goddess of love — SkimNews
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- The "Aphrodite" exhibition argues that the Roman Venus is a "cheap substitute" for Greek Aphrodite, who was in turn a "ripoff" of a matriarchal deity once worshipped on Cyprus, illustrated by prehistoric totems and terracotta figures of childbirth and motherhood.
- A c.1490 Botticelli workshop painting of Venus, lent for the show, suggests the Uffizi's Birth of Venus was already iconic enough to be copied and reissued without the zephyrs or green sea.
- The Crouching Venus marble from the royal collection — sold by Cromwell's regime after the beheading of Charles I, then acquired by Peter Lely, who painted Nell Gwyn nude based on it — appears in the show with no exploration of its influence on later art.
- Michelangelo Pistoletto's 1967 Venus of the Rags, a marble nude surrounded by a heap of overflowing clothes, is included to trace the goddess's arc through to the 20th century.
- A red-figure vase in the first room depicts Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena preparing for the beauty contest that will trigger the Trojan War, while a minor 16th-century print breezily covers her marriage to Hephaestos and adultery with Ares.
- The show spotlights Praxiteles's 4th-century BC Venus of Knidos as the first nude Aphrodite, citing the ancient anecdote of an admirer who entered the sanctuary at night and left a semen stain on the statue's thigh.
- Reviewer Jonathan Jones concludes that Botticelli is the exhibition's "true believer," having revived the goddess of love after roughly 1,000 years of Christian exile — and that the show wastes space and places its Cypriot prehistory "crushingly out of sequence."
Why it matters: For visitors and curators, the show's mismatch between its world-class loans and its curatorial framework illustrates how a bold revisionist thesis about a canonical art-historical subject can falter without a clear chronological spine. Jones singles out the structural decision to place the prehistoric Cypriot origins section mid-way through, rather than at the entrance, as a missed opportunity to land the matriarchal-goddess argument.
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