The Art Newspaper

Aphrodite and the Gods of Love

26 Oct 11 – 20 Feb 11

boston. Love is in the air in Boston this autumn as the Museum of Fine Arts prepares to show off its substantial Greek antiquities collection—one of the finest such assemblages in the US—in the first major museum exhibition devoted to Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

Devotees of this deity named after the sea foam (aphros) from which she emerged, believed that she held sway over many aspects of their lives including courtship, sexuality, marriage, fertility, and ­military victory resulting from the bonds between men.

This exhibition celebrates the goddess by examining her mythology, image and the importance placed upon her by those who ­worshipped her. The exhibition also pays tribute to Boston-born classicist and collector Edward Perry Warren (1860-1929) from whom more than half of the 160 vessels, sculptures, mosaics and wall paintings on display originated, either through donation or purchase.

“He had a particular interest in erotic and edgy art,” says Christine Kondoleon, the museum’s senior curator of Greek and Roman art.

Kondoleon says that many of the pieces acquired from Warren at the turn of the century went straight into the Boston museum’s reserve collection in the basement where they were available by request only.

One of the pieces featured is the newly laser-cleaned, five-foot-tall sculpture of Aphrodite’s son, the fertility god Priapos, whose main attribute is his sizeable, permanent erection.

“He is the ultimate giggle machine,” says Kondoleon, adding that before the ­recent cleaning “he was rather sloppy and looked like he had been left in a garden in Italy for 500 years. Now he looks his best.” The show is divided into sections that focus on Aphrodite’s birth and Near Eastern origin, her cult, the various myths associated with her, and the role her son Eros and other gods of love played in ancient myths.

The concept of idealised beauty is also explored, beginning with the moment in the fourth century BC when the sculptor Praxiteles first depicted Aphrodite in the nude—the first for a ­female deity.

This now lost but much copied sculpture became the preferred image of the goddess and has been copied by artists for millennia. Works from the museum’s own collection are supplemented by nine on loan from Naples and Rome ­including the second-century AD Statue of a Sleeping Hermaphrodite from Palazzo alle Terme, Museo Nazionale Romano, which has only been shown outside Italy once before.

Highlights from the museum’s collection include the famous Bartlett Head, a fourth-century BC head of Aphrodite. Emily Sharpe Categories: Archaeology & Ancient art

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