Aphrodite show recasts Venus as cheap Roman copy of Cypriot goddess — SkimNews
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- Aphrodite exhibition reframes Venus as "a cheap Roman substitute" for the original Greek Aphrodite, whom the show claims was an appropriation of a pre-Hellenic matriarchal deity once worshipped on Cyprus, evidenced by prehistoric totems and terracotta figures of childbirth.
- Botticelli and his workshop's c. 1490 version of The Birth of Venus — without the zephyrs or green sea — suggests the museum's iconic painting was famous enough to be commissioned in stripped-down replica form.
- A Crouching Venus lent from the royal collection was sold by Cromwell's republican regime after the beheading of Charles I, acquired by Peter Lely, who used it as inspiration for nudes including a portrait of Nell Gwyn; Rubens also saw it and based his Venus Frigida on the same statue.
- The Capitoline Venus, a second-century AD Roman marble, is a copy of Praxiteles' fourth-century BC Venus of Knidos — the first nude Aphrodite in Greek art, whose intimacy so scandalized viewers that an admirer reportedly entered her sanctuary by night and left a semen stain on the statue's marble thigh.
- A graffiti-like relief from a Roman fort north of Hadrian's Wall depicts a naked Venus bathing — evidence the Romans spread the nude goddess image throughout their empire, far from its Mediterranean origins.
- The reviewer criticizes the show's ordering as "crushingly out of sequence," arguing the Cypriot "originals" should have come first before Greek and Renaissance masterpieces, and that the first ancient-Greece room is "almost breezy" with stories it dismisses in a "yada yada" fashion.
- Michelangelo Pistoletto's 1967 assemblage Venus of the Rags — a marble nude seen from behind amid heaps of clothing resembling a rubbish-strewn Naples piazza — anchors the show's argument that the Venus nude became "just a word for 'female nude'" across two millennia of European art.
Why it matters: The exhibition's central claim — that the nude Aphrodite was a Greek invention layered over a Cypriot matriarchal cult, then cheapened by Rome — is grounded in world-class loans, but the reviewer finds the curatorial sequencing undermines that thesis by burying the most powerful pieces (Botticelli's hypnotic gaze, the scandalous Knidos marble) under underwhelming early rooms and half-developed archaeological speculation.
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