The Ashmolean museum in Oxford presents Aphrodite: The Making of a Goddess, an exhibition that, despite some world-class loans, tells the goddess's story in a jumbled way. The show opens with a Botticelli painting from about 1490, very similar to his The Birth of Venus in the Uffizi, Florence. This version, also by Botticelli and his workshop, omits the zephyrs and green sea, focusing solely on the goddess body, suggesting the Uffizi masterpiece was already an icon worthy of replication.
Venus, in art, is essentially a word for "female nude". Botticelli started a modern appetite that has never ended, inspiring a host of lush sex goddesses that ruled European art through to Michelangelo Pistoletto's ironic 1967 assemblage Venus of the Rags, also on display. In that work, a heap of old clothes overflows from a corner around a marble nude seen from behind, the mix of beauty and chaos resembling a rubbish-strewn Naples piazza.
A jumbled narrative
The exhibition, however, is not called Venus and does not tell her artistic story except in bits with vast lacunae. Instead, it sees Venus as a cheap Roman substitute for the original Greek love goddess Aphrodite, who in turn is exposed as a ripoff of a matriarchal deity once worshipped on Cyprus. The result is a mixture of world-class loans and an archaeological hobbyhorse.
Both the quality and gaps hit you straight away with a classical marble Crouching Venus, lent from the royal collection. There is no exploration of its impact on later art. In fact, this Roman copy of an ancient Greek original was sold by Cromwell's republican regime after the beheading of its royal owner, Charles I. It was acquired by the artist Peter Lely, who painted his own mysterious, nude, anti-Puritan masterpiece Nymphs by a Fountain. After the Restoration, he also portrayed Nell Gwyn nude. Before that, Rubens saw this same statue and based his painting Venus Frigida on it.
The story of Aphrodite/Venus in art is massive, epic and complex. Perhaps the comparatively small size of the exhibition cannot hold all that, yet a lot of space is wasted. The first room displays the many ways Aphrodite was depicted in ancient Greece, including a Red-figure vase with a scene of her and rival goddesses, Hera and Athena, preparing for the beauty contest she will win, leading to the Trojan war. The marriage of Aphrodite to the smith-god Hephaestos and her adultery with Ares, god of war, is told in a yada yada way and illustrated by a minor 16th-century print.
The Cypriot connection
Suddenly the show plunges way, way back to encounter what it claims was the real, original Aphrodite. In classical mythology, Aphrodite has a special relationship with Cyprus: it is to Cyprian shores that her shell wafts in The Birth of Venus. The exhibition argues that the Greek Aphrodite is an appropriation of a female deity who was once all-powerful on the island. Prehistoric totems with abstract bodies, and in one case a bird's head, attest to the centrality of this cult. Terracotta figures of childbirth and motherhood may have been offered by women to this nameless deity. Other images mix her with Egyptian and Phoenician deities. But the review was not convinced that any of this explains the Greek and Roman love divinity. Either way, it is crushingly out of sequence – why didn't they start here then go forward in time?
What's inescapable is that the ancient Greeks made nudity their thing. It embodied their sense of being different from other cultures. But you don't want to be caught looking too long at the Capitoline Venus. This second-century AD Roman marble statue is a copy of a lost work that was an ancient scandal: the Venus of Knidos by Praxiteles. Before Praxiteles, the Greeks didn't portray Aphrodite nude, so people were powerfully struck by its intimacy when it was unveiled in the fourth century BC. Aphrodite has stripped for her bath and is trying, failing, to cover herself with her arms. One besotted admirer allegedly entered her sanctuary by night and rubbed himself against the statue's cold hard thigh, leaving a semen stain.
A troubling transformation
It's troubling to see this after you've encountered the evidence for the ancient Cypriot Aphrodite. It looks as if the Greeks took a matriarchal deity and turned her into a sex toy. The Romans borrowed that nude image and spread it throughout their empire: a raw, graffiti-like relief from a fort north of Hadrian's Wall of a naked Venus bathing is a funny, fascinating delight.
For the reviewer, it is Botticelli who is the true believer in Aphrodite/Venus. For 1,000 years, ever since the fall of the Roman empire, she was cast out by Christianity. Her worship was revived in the Renaissance. When you gaze at the unfathomable eyes of his Venus, you too believe that love is a holy thing that deserves its own deity. Aphrodite: The Making of a Goddess is at Ashmolean museum, Oxford from 8 October 2026 to 11 April 2027.
