Embedded Files
Author(s): BAŽANT, JAN
Abstract: This paper analyses the story about a young lover who left the semen mark on the marble statue of Knidia by Praxiteles. The findings are threefold. First, we show that the literal interpretation of this ancient story began in the seventies of the 20th century, in connection with a feminist re-evaluation of Western cultural tradition. Second, we argue that the ancient story cannot be taken at face value. The story of Knidia's lover does not provide information either about the appearance and staging of this marble statue, or the way in which actual visitors behaved in its sanctuary at Knidos. Third, we stress that any interpretation of the Tale of Stain must take into account that its original audience was aware that it was a work of art with tremendous sacred power.
The Legend of Knidia Today
In approximately 360 BC, the Greek sculptor Praxiteles created the famous
statue of Aphrodite, which was known as Knidia in antiquity because it stood
in her sanctuary at Knidos.1 As the first depiction of the naked female body on
a monumental scale, the statue often figured in ancient legends. Recently, the
tale of the amorous stain on her marble thigh has become extremely popular
in Classical Archaeology and the History of Art.
This popularity moved Leonard Barkan to ask “how this story might be fundamental
to the history of art?” He concluded his essay by stating: “What is essentially
missing from the story of the stain … is the aesthetic impulse to separate
art from life, without sacrificing its erotic charge.”2 When Barkan returned to
the topic several years later, he expressed it bluntly: “The lad who locks himself
in the shrine experiences no complex or transformative mimesis in the presence
of the aesthetic object; he is rather like those birds who fly down to peck at the
grapes in Zeuxis’s painting or (in a slightly more flattering story) like Cimabue,
who attempted to swat the painted fly that his pupil Giotto added to one of the
master’s frescoes.3 Only instead of pecking or swatting, he is staining.”4 In this
paper, we shall argue that even though the Tale of Stain cannot be fundamental
to the history of art, it was not as trivial as Barkan implies.
The Tale of Stain is just one ancient anecdote about the statue of Aphrodite
at Knidos but by far the most quoted one today. So, why did it captivate the
attention of scholars? When and why did the Tale of the Stain arouse the interest
of classical archaeologists and art historians? Why and how do they think
it tells us something important about the usage and, consequently, the perception
of Knidia? These are the problems explored in the present paper. Its topic
is a criticism of modern legends, inspired by a legend which has been passed
down from classical antiquity. Nevertheless, this is not to say that this ancient
legend is to be dismissed. If we do not take it at its face value, it can tell us a
lot about Knidia. In the conclusion of this paper, I present my view of what
the legend of Knidia may convey.
Tale of the Stain
We begin by summing up what we know from ancient literary tradition about
the semen mark on the marble statue of Aphrodite. It is known above all from
two texts, one by Pliny and dialogue on love ascribed to Lucian. In AD 77,
Pliny the Elder completed his encyclopaedia known as the Natural History in
which he wrote:
Superior to all the works, not only of Praxiteles, but indeed in the whole world,
is the Aphrodite which many people have sailed to Knidos in order to see. He
made two statues and offered them for sale at the same time; one of them was
represented with the body draped, for which reason the people of Kos, whose
choice it was (since he had put the same price on both), preferred it, judging
that this was the sober and proper thing to do. The people of Knidos bought
the rejected one, the fame of which became immensely greater … That statue’s
shrine is completely open so that it is possible to observe the image of the
goddess from every side; she herself, it is believed, favoured its being made that
way. Nor is one’s admiration of the statue less from any side. They say that a
certain man was once overcome with love for the statue and that, after he had
hidden himself in the shrine during the nighttime, he embraced it (simulacro
cohaesisse) and that thus bears the stain, an indication of his lust (eiusque cupiditatis
esse indicem maculam).5
The story of the statue lover is bizarre, but it must have sounded familiar to
Pliny’s readers. Earlier in his book, he mentioned it in passing, as something
everybody knew.6 And in the next paragraph, he told a similar story about another
work by Praxiteles, the Eros of Parion. A lover “left upon it the same sort
of trace of his love” (in eo quoque simile amoris vestigium reliquit).7 Pliny did not
forget to distance himself from the anecdote and the young man involved in
it, for he begins his narration by stating: “They say.” He explains in a way the
story of image mania by indicating that the nudity of Aphrodite was a novelty
in its time. The people of Kos, he states, preferred the dressed statue (velata
specie) as being more sober (severum) and proper (pudicum). But he states that
Aphrodite herself consented (favente ipsa) to be seen naked. Nevertheless, he
does not tell his readers anything about the consequences of the young Knidian’s
incredible love.
What else can we say about Pliny’s text? When we read it carefully, we realise
that it is probably a compilation from sources originating in different epochs.
It contains a contradiction: Aphrodite’s “shrine was completely open” (aedicula
eius tota aperitur) which corresponds to what archaeologists call a monopteros,
“a colonnade that defines a circular or a rectangular space”.8 If the statue was
seen “from every side” (undique), how had the statue lover “hidden” (delituisset)
in it? In a shrine in which a statue was seen from every side, anyone else was
also clearly visible. The lover of the statue could either have stayed overnight in
a completely open shrine, or he could have hidden in a closed sanctuary. In the
more than 400 years which separate Praxiteles and Pliny, the shrine of Knidia
could have been rebuilt. But in whatever architectural form, it continued to be
haunted by the phantom lover.
There is also the problem of Knidia’s viewability from all angles. Pliny wrote
that: “it is possible to observe the image of the goddess from every side” (nec
minor ex quacumque parte admiratio est). This indicates a monopteros or tholos,
a circular building with a colonnade, in the centre of which the statue could
have been placed. In the 1960s, the remains of a circular temple in Corinthian
style were unearthed on Knidos, which was identified as the shrine of Aphrodite
Knidia. Later research, however, questioned this interpretation.9 The staging
of the Aphrodite statue in Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli in AD 118–133 probably
evoked not only the real architecture of Knidos, but also its image in the liter-
ary tradition.10 Be that as it may, the statue which originally stood in the centre
of the Doric-style Tivoli shrine belongs to a sculptural type which is believed
to have reproduced Knidia.
The Knidia created by Praxiteles is forever lost. Nevertheless, we believe we
know the statue from Roman coins and Roman marble copies.11 The goddess is
entirely naked and covers her crotch with her right hand (figs. 1–2). She stands
in a relaxed attitude, with one leg slightly bent. She looks vivacious, because
we see her from the front, but her face is slightly turned towards the left. In
her raised left hand she holds a garment which hangs partially over a hydria,
water jar, on the ground. She is either putting the garment down or picking it
up. What is important, however, is that the attribute evokes water, from which
Aphrodite was born, or bathing, which she did after emerging from the sea. We
know of about 50 marble life-size statues and 100 statuettes in stone, ceramics
or bronze, which are of this sculptural type. However, this type does not
wholly conform to literary tradition. In it, the water jar is never mentioned. Of
far more importance is that this sculptural type, according to the consensus of
researchers, was created to be viewed from the front.
It is of course possible to look at statues which we believe to be reproductions
of Knidia from all angles, but we do not gain anything and lose a lot.
When seen from the sides, we cannot fully appreciate Knidia’s nudity and contrapposto,
her action is not apparent and the statue’s silhouette is less attractive
when compared to the view en face (fig. 3a–b). I do not think Knidia was
created to be seen from behind (fig. 3c). When we view it from this angle, the
proportions of the statue are grotesquely disfigured. Since Knidia’s head is bent
forward, it seems much smaller from behind and, consequently, her massive
back is improperly dominant. From behind, this alleged embodiment of feminine
beauty looks more like a young man. The view from the front is by far the
most attractive one (fig. 3d). That is the reason why some scholars contest the
correctness of the identification of Knidia with the preserved sculptural type.12
Then why did Pliny stress that visitors walk around Knidia, if it did not enhance
either their aesthetic experience or the ideological message of the statue?
The question might be answered if we, breaking with the traditional attitude,
do not take at face value the text by Pliny and other ancient authors. What if,
in Roman times, circumvention was not so much part of visitors’ practice in
the sanctuary of Aphrodite at Knidos, but a theme in the legend of Knidia?
In it, aesthetic and religious experiences were later eclipsed by erotic fantasies,
which may be amplified by observing “the image of the goddess from every
side”. Be that as it may, the real woman within Knidia is also the central motif
of the second and much more detailed version of the Tale of the Stain. We find
it in the work known as Erotes ( Amores) and once ascribed to Lucian, dated to
the 4th century AD.13 In Erotes, Lycinus, the alter ego of the author, visits the
sanctuary of Aphrodite Knidia with two friends, Callicratides of Athens and
Charicles of Corinth. The former is a pronounced homosexual, the latter defends
heterosexual love. This polarity is crucial to the text. Callicratides and
Charicles respond differently to the sight of Knidia:
We entered the temple. In the midst thereof stands the goddess – she’s a most
beautiful statue of Parian marble – arrogantly smiling a little as a grin parts her
lips. Draped by no garment, all her beauty is uncovered and revealed, except
in so far as she unobtrusively uses one hand to hide her private parts. So great
was the power of the craftsman’s art that the hard unyielding marble did justice
to every limb. Charicles at any rate raised a mad distracted cry and exclaimed,
“Happiest indeed of the gods was Ares, who suffered chains because of her!”
And, as he spoke, he ran up and, stretching out his neck as far as he could,
started to kiss the goddess with importunate lips. Callicratidas stood by in silence
with amazement in his heart.14
The statue of Aphrodite which confronted visitors, covered her “private parts”
(τὴν αἰδῶ) with her hand. In the literary tradition, this characteristic gesture of
the sculptural type of Knidia is mentioned for the first time in Erotes. Archaeologists
call statues characterised by this gesture Venus pudica. The modest (or
chaste) goddess of Love? The Latin term is a neologism, which has no substantiation
in ancient sources. Why should Aphrodite be ashamed? She openly declared
sexuality and urged her worshippers to be sexual; she unconditionally
promoted seduction and carnal love. In Erotes there is no indication that Aphrodite
is represented as being embarrassed. The gesture is not the result of a swift
movement. The author of Erotes wrote that she performed it “unobtrusively”
(λεληθότως). The goddess is not at all surprised; the author noted that she is
“arrogantly smiling a little as a grin parts her lips” (ὑπερήφανον καὶ σεσηρότι
γέλωτι μικρὸν ὑπομειδιῶσα). The gesture of Knidia’s hand does not seem to
express “propriety and self-respecting modesty”.15 The represented goddess is
evidently enjoying the situation in which she finds herself. Her hand gesture
does not protect her, which means that it is intended for visitors. She does not
cover her private parts, but rather draws attention to them. The goddess provokes
visitors and her strategy works perfectly. In Erotes, young men were deeply
affected. They could not move, but wept silently, or emitted wild cries, ran up
to the statue, embracing and kissing the marble.
This arousal indicates that the author of Erotes could not have had in mind
only the sculptural type we connect with Knidia. Judging by these copies, although
Praxiteles represented Aphrodite without clothes, she remained, so to
speak, covered up. In Erotes we read that she is “draped by no garment” (οὐδεμιᾶς
ἐσθῆτος ἀμπεχούσης γεγύμνωται) and “her beauty is uncovered and revealed”
(πᾶν δὲ τὸ κάλλος αὐτῆς ἀκάλυπτον). Praxiteles revealed her crotch, it is true,
but he probably did indicate neither her pubic hair nor vulva. Modern viewers
easily pass over this detail, because Knidia influenced not only ancient depictions
of Aphrodite, but also those of female nudes in the Western tradition. In
them, the smooth pubic triangle dominated up to the 19th century. It was only
on his wedding night, we are told, that John Ruskin, an eminent art connoisseur
who was 29 at the time, discovered that women have pubic hair.
Today, Praxiteles’s innovation (if it was really an innovation) is a well-known
fact,16 because it stirred up a vivid discussion among researchers. Zainab Bahrani
assumed the extreme position: “The genitals on the Hellenistic Aphrodite statues
are neither under-represented nor schematically represented. They are not represented;
they are denied, non-existent. They are a void where something, a part
of the female anatomy, and significantly, the sexual part, should be. The vulva is
not covered by clothes or obscured by any props. It is rejected as non-existent.
This detail is particularly remarkable in that the Aphrodite statues represent a
goddess of sexuality.”17 Kristen Seaman opposed this view by stressing that, in
some sculptural copies of Knidia, the pubic hair and/or labia are indicated in
relief or in paint, sometimes by both methods.18 However, the problem remains
unresolved. If pubic hair and the vulva were discreetly indicated on some copies,
why we do not find them on the absolute majority of the remainder of them?
In Greek monumental art, naked men were represented several centuries
before naked women. From the beginning until the end of the Greco-Roman
civilisation, their genitals were represented realistically, including pubic hair,
which was mostly rendered plastically. In 5th-century BC vase paintings, artists
approached female genitals like any other human body part, representing both
pubic hair and labia. Praxiteles perhaps abandoned this tradition and broke the
established convention which dictated the faithful representation of all visible
anatomic traits of the human body. It does not seem to be the result of neglect
or improvisation, but rather an important element of his new type of Aphrodite
as a monumental sculpture.19 Praxiteles stripped Aphrodite, but before he made
the final touches with his chisel, he might change the strategy. He perhaps created
a new artistic convention by combining his realistic depiction of the naked
female body with an unrealistic anatomical detail, a smooth pubic triangle,
an analogy of the fig leaf covering male genitals in Western artistic tradition.
It may be argued that Praxiteles characterised Aphrodite in this way to stress
her divinity. The absence of genitals would not make her powerless, but, on the
contrary, would stress her divine power which differentiated her from mortal
women.20 Be that as it may, Praxiteles covered this feature with Knidia’s hand
to draw attention to it. What is remarkable is that visitors in Erotes in no way
commented on the supposed extra-terrestrial aspect of Knidia’s appearance, even
though they inspected the statue very closely. The described minute inspection
also took place from behind the statue:
The temple had a door on both sides for the benefit of those also who wish
to have a good view of the goddess from behind, so that no part of her be left
unadmired. It’s easy therefore for people to enter by the other door and survey
the beauty of her back. And so we decided to see all of the goddess and went
round to the back of the precinct. Then, when the door had been opened by
the woman responsible for keeping the keys, we were filled with an immediate
wonder for the beauty we beheld. The Athenian who had been so impassive
an observer a minute before, upon inspecting those parts of the goddess
which recommend a boy, suddenly raised a shout far more frenzied than that
of Charicles. “Heracles!” he exclaimed, “what a well-proportioned back! What
generous flanks she has! How satisfying an armful to embrace! How delicately
moulded the flesh on the buttocks, neither too thin and close to the bone, nor
yet revealing too great an expanse of fat! And as for those precious parts sealed
in on either side by the hips, how inexpressibly sweetly they smile! How perfect
the proportions of the thighs and the shins as they stretch down in a straight
line to the feet! So that’s what Ganymede looks like as he pours out the nectar
in heaven for Zeus and makes it taste sweeter. For I’d never have taken the cup
from Hebe if she served me.” While Callicratidas was shouting this under the
spell of the goddess, Charicles in the excess of his admiration stood almost petrified,
though his emotions showed in the melting tears trickling from his eyes.21
The trio in Erotes did not visit the same type of sanctuary which Pliny referred
to. In Erotes, one cannot walk around the statue; there was only a front and a
back door, so one could view the statue either en face or from behind. The
back door played a key role in this text, because the boundaries between the
female and male body were blurred from this point of view. Athenian and Corinthian
were struck with equal intensity by the sight of Knidia, which was to be
expected. Aphrodite presided over Love in general, heterosexual or homosexual,
whatever one enjoyed or desired. At the same time, however, the back door prepared
the stage for making an important distinction between heterosexual and
homosexual love, between vaginal and anal penetration. It was at “the back of
the precinct” in the realm of homosexual love, when a stain was discovered on
the back of Knidia’s marble thigh:
When we could admire no more, we noticed a mark on one thigh like a stain
on a dress … the attendant woman who was standing near us told us a strange,
incredible story. For she said that a young man of a not undistinguished family
… was so ill-starred as to fall in love with the goddess … In the end the violent
tension of his desires turned to desperation and he found in audacity a procurer
for his lusts. For, when the sun was now sinking to its setting, quietly and unnoticed
by those present, he slipped in behind the door and, standing invisible
in the inmost part of the chamber, he kept still, hardly even breathing. When
the attendants closed the door from the outside in the normal way, this new
Anchises was locked in. But why do I chatter on and tell you in every detail
the reckless deed of that unmentionable night? These marks of his amorous
embraces were seen after day came and the goddess had that blemish to prove
what she’d suffered. The youth concerned is said, according to the popular story
told, to have hurled himself over a cliff or down into the waves of the sea and
to have vanished utterly.
While the temple-woman was recounting this, Charicles interrupted her
account with a shout and said, “Women therefore inspire love even when made
of stone. But what would have happened if we had seen such beauty alive and
breathing? Would not that single night has been valued as highly as the sceptre
of Zeus?” But Callicratidas smiled and said, “… we have a clear proof of the
truth about the Aphrodite whom you hold in such esteem.” When Charicles
asked how this was, I thought Callicratidas made a very convincing reply. For
he said that, although the love-struck youth had seized the chance to enjoy
a whole uninterrupted night and had complete liberty to glut his passion, he
nevertheless made love to the marble as though to a boy, because, I’m sure, he
didn’t want to be confronted by the female parts. 22
“It is possible,” wrote Sophie Montel, “that Pseudo-Lucian invented the two
doors in order to introduce the story of the young man who felt in love with
the goddess.”23 What was important was that the statue could be accessed from
the front and the back. The front was for heterosexuals, the back for homosexuals.
Standing behind the statue, Callicratidas argued that the ill-fated lover
of Knidia “made love to the marble as though to a boy” (παιδικῶς τῷ λίθῳ
προσωμίλησεν), because he feared “the female parts,” that is “the woman”
(θῆλυ). Every ancient reader of Erotes knew very well that there is no difference
in whatever way you make love to a marble statue, the rear is no better than
the front. It depends exclusively on your preference in real life. The Tale of the
Stain in Erotes is not about sculpture, but about sex. Such tales, Seaman claim,
“could have been told about any statue, indeed they were. Such stories appear
in numerous contexts; the Knidia is just a substitute for other statues or even
other objects. If it is the idea of Knidia’s sexuality, then, that is most important
and allows the statue to participate in such memorable topoi.”24
In this connection, we may quote another anecdote, in which love of Knidia
was used as an argument. It came from Memorable Doings and Sayings of Valerius
Maximus, Pliny’s contemporary:
Praxiteles set up Vulcan’s consort breathing as it were in marble in the temple
at Cnidus. The beauty of the work is such that it was hardly safe from a libidinous
embrace, so providing some excuse for the mistake of a stallion which
on seeing the picture of a mare could not help neighing, or of the dogs which
the sight of a dog in a painting caused to bark, or of the bull in Syracuse that
was driven to erotic intercourse with a bronze cow by the stimulus of too close
a likeness. For why should we be surprised that animals void of reason (ratio)
should be deceived by art, when we see a human being’s sacrilegious lust excited
by the outlines of voiceless stone?25
Stallions do not react in any way to pictures of mares, dogs do not bark at pictures
of dogs, and bulls do not attempt to have intercourse with sculptures of
cows. Even less do marble statues light man’s fire. That is the point of stories
like this, which were told in antiquity to amuse by their absurdity. They invited
readers to imagine what would happen if … In this case, what would happen if
men did not use their reason properly when confronted with a lifelike representation
of a naked woman. This is explicitly stated in Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius
of Tyana, where the sage is confronted with a man who wants to marry
Knidia.26 His compatriots approve of this and Apollonius declares that he will
bring them to their senses:
There was a man who was in love with a nude statue of Aphrodite which is erected
in Cnidus; and he was making offerings to it, and said that he would make
yet others to marrying the statue. But Apollonius, though on other grounds he
thought his conduct absurd, yet as the islanders were not averse to the idea, but
said that the fame of the goddess would be greatly enhanced if she had a lover,
determined to purge the temple of all this nonsense; and when the Cnidians
asked him if he would reform their system of sacrifice or their litanies in any
way, he replied: “I will reform your eyes, but let the ancestral service of your
temple as it is.” Accordingly he called to him the languishing lover and asked
him if he believed in the existence of the gods: and when he replied that he
believed in their existence so firmly that he was actually in love with them, and
mentioned a marriage with one of them which he hoped to celebrate shortly,
Apollonius replied: “The poets have turned your poor head by their talk of
unions of Anchises and Peleus and other heroes with goddess; but I know this
much about loving and being loved: gods fall in love with gods, and human beings
with human beings…” Thus he put a stop to this mad freak, and the man
went away who said he was in love, after sacrificing in order to gain forgiveness.27
Apollonius “reformed their eyes”, which means that Knidians did not see a
statue, but a goddess, which was a sin, the story implies. That is why the whole
story ends with the act of traditional religiosity – the cured fool sacrificed to
Knidia to ask her pardon for his folly. Christian authors were particularly implacable
opponents of love for statues, which they used to criticise the pagan
religious practice of worshipping the statues of gods. In the Exhortation to the
Greeks, Clement of Alexandria wrote of Knidia:
Aphrodite in Cnidus was of stone, and beautiful … person became enamoured of
it, and shamefully embraced the stone … So powerful is art to delude, by seducing
amorous men into the pit. Art is powerful, but it cannot deceive reason, nor
those who live agreeably to reason. The doves on the picture were represented
so to the life by the painter’s art, that the pigeons flew to them; and horses have
neighed to well-executed pictures of mares. They say that a girl became enamoured
of an image, and a comely youth of the statue at Cnidus. But it was the
eyes of the spectators that were deceived by art; for no one in his senses ever
would have embraced a goddess, or entombed himself with a lifeless paramour,
or become enamoured of a demon and a stone. But it is with a different kind of
spell that art deludes you, if it leads you not to the indulgence of amorous affections:
it leads you to pay religious honour and worship to images and pictures. 28
The fascination with pagan statues, Clement of Alexandria argued, stems from
the power of art to delude. Works of art are lifelike, but fatally lifeless, which
may be the raison d’être of the tales of incredible love for statues and paintings
of women, in which the Greeks and Romans delighted. These stories were not,
however, about statues. In the texts of Apollonius, Philostratos and in Erotes,
Knidia and other works of art were used as signifiers. The relationship between
the signifier (referent) and the signified might be arbitrary. In Erotes, the visit to
the Knidian sanctuary of Aphrodite was the pretext for a pseudo-philosophical
discussion about homo- and heterosexual love, as Michel Foucault demonstrated
in his magisterial book The History of Sexuality. In this discussion, Knidia was
the signifier. What was signified was the polarity of hetero- and homosexual
love. Foucault’s analysis of Erotes was enormously influential.29 This no doubt
contributed to the popularity of the “meaningful anecdote” of Knidia’s stain,
as it was referred to by Foucault.30 All anecdotes are meaningful, but they must
never be taken at their face value. However, with regard to the Tale of the
Stain, precisely this is sometimes considered an acceptable attitude in Classical
Archaeology and the History of Art today.
In the ambitious Companion to Ancient Aesthetics we read: “The Cnidia’s nudity
appears to make her available, but ultimately the statue is inaccessible, and the
man who tries to have sex with her can only climax on her thigh. The statue’s
beautiful exterior allows her inner divinity to be imagined, but, like divinity
itself, it can never be tangibly realized.”31 By this reasoning, the signifier and
signified are motivated. Knidia (the signifier) visualises the sexual availability of
the statue (the signified). In other words, Knidia created an illusion of the sexual
availability of the statue which caused the anonymous young man to copulate
with it. In art, nudity may signal availability of the represented woman.32 But
works of art are never sexually available, whatever they represent.
So, when and why did the Tale of the Stain make its debut in scholarship on
ancient sculpture? With regard to the first question, Kenneth Clark’s The Nude,
published for the first time in 1956, gives a solid date post quem. In this scholarly
bestseller, Clark devotes a whole chapter to the representation of the female nude
in classical antiquity. He was neither a classical art historian nor archaeologist
and one could not expect he would include many ancient sources in his writing.
Nevertheless, he mentions both Pliny and the author of Erotes whose texts on
Knidia he retells at length. He stresses that, in Erotes, visitors “spoke of her (that
is Knidia) exactly as if she had been a living woman of overwhelming beauty.”
In classical Antiquity, Clark argues, “no one questioned the fact that she (that
is Aphrodite) was an embodiment of physical desire, and that this mysterious,
compulsive force was an element in her sanctity”.33 Nevertheless, Clark does
not mention the Tale of the Stain. According to him “the luxuriant sensuality
of the form is modified by the Greek sense of decorum.”
Writing about Praxiteles’s Knidia, Clark stresses that “perhaps no religion
ever again incorporated physical passion as calmly, as sweetly and as naturally …
It was a triumph for beauty; and to the Greek mind this beauty … was already
present in the person of his model Phryne.”34 According to a story recorded in
c. AD 200, on the occasion of a religious festival in Eleusis, Phryne, a celebrated
prostitute, appeared naked in public, let loose her hair and walked into the sea.35
The famous painter, Apelles, used her as a model for Aphrodite Anadyomene
(rising from the sea). We are told that Praxiteles, who fell in love with Phryne,
used her body as a model for Knidia. In the Exhortation to the Greeks, Clement
of Alexandria used the story to ridicule pagan divinities:
Praxiteles, as Posidippus shows clearly in his book on Cnidus, when fashioning
the statue of Cnidian Aphrodite, made the goddess resembles the form of his
mistress Cratina, which the miserable people might have the sculptor’s mistress
to worship.36
Clark’s attitude to art was still largely dependent on Johann Joachim Winckelmann,
who taught that the beauty of Greek Art reflected the physical and
spiritual beauty of the Ancient Greeks. While Winckelmann gave preference to
male nudes,37 according to Clark, the beauty of Knidia echoed the beauty of
the body and mind of Phryne and Greek women in general. Clark had no problem
with the visitor in Erotes, who, as he wrote, “leapt on her (Knidia’s) pedestal
and threw his arms round her neck”, which caused the sacristan to be “mildly
shocked”.38 However, the young man who left an ugly stain on the statue had
evidently crossed the line. This behaviour did not conform to the “Greek sense
of decorum” as Clark understood it and that is why he passed in silence over
this shameful and un-Greek comportment. For Clark, as for Winckelmann, “the
only way for us to become great … is imitation of the Ancients”.39 The attempt
to copulate with a statue is certainly not the right way to greatness.
Feminist View
It was in the seventies of the 20th century, during the second wave of the feminist
movement,40 that the Tale of the Stain entered scholarly discussions on
Ancient Greek sculpture. In subsequent decades, the relative frequency of quotations
of relevant passages in Pliny and Erotes in scholarly monographs and
papers sky-rocketed. The feminist re-evaluation of the nude in art was opened
in the provocative book, The Nude Male: A New Perspective, published by Mar-
garet Walters in 1978. According to her, the primordial veneration of women
and female fertility replaced the reign of the phallus, in which the penis started
to represent the renewal of the powers of Nature. Praxiteles represented Aphrodite
naked because, in his time, “her earlier, more disturbing associations with
fertility and childbirth had been suppressed or transferred to other gods.” The
goddess “had been reduced to an object of sexual desire.”
In a phallocentric world, Walters complains, “it is easy – and was apparently
easy for the Greeks – to treat Aphrodite (Knidia) simply as an attractive woman.
Lucian’s account of a visit to her shrine … is not exactly memorable for its religious
fervour. Both he and Pliny mention the man who was so overcome by
love for the statue that he hid himself in the sanctuary at night, leaving a stain
on the statue ‘as indication of his lust.’”41 In the time Walters published her
book, the story of Knidia’s lover was not as popular as today. In collections of
ancient sources about Greek art by Overbeck and Politt, only Pliny’s very short
version was quoted.42 Much longer and more colourful account of Lucian was
included in neither of these standard handbooks.
The third volume of Foucoult’s book on sexuality, in which Lucian’s version
of the story of the lover of Knida was analysed at length, was published
in French in 1984,43 six years after Walter’s book. Consequently, with Walters
begins the evolution of the modern Tale of Stain. A trace of male desire left
behind on the immaculate white marble representing the female body is a key
element in this mental construction, in which it became an exhibit of phallocentrism.
Women are seen by men and their depictions are destined exclusively
for men. In a man’s world, women are never subjects, but always objects. To
Ancient Greek men, we are told again and again, Knidia was merely an erotic
object. The Tale of the Stain apparently proved this beyond any doubt, that is
why it returned from oblivion. The young Ancient Greek “leaving a stain on the
statue” became the archetype of the self-centred oppressor of the second sex.
Men treat women as fundamentally different, inferior, beings to be conquered,
subdued and stained.
In a comprehensive book on women in the classical world of 1994, the Tale
of Stain is not yet mentioned.44 In 1995, Christine Mitchell Havelock’s groundbreaking
monograph, The Aphrodite of Knidos and Her Successors, was published.
Since then, it has been the main source of information on Knidia. This authoritative
monograph ignored the feminist reading of Praxiteles’s famous statue.
Havelock mentions Pliny’s Tale of the Stain in passing,45 but she draws no conclusions
from it. Following Clark, Havelock ignores the version in Erotes. But
in a widely read book on Greek women by Sue Blundel, which was published
in the same year as that of Havelock, the behaviour of the man in the Tale of
the Stain is characterised as “sexual assault”.46 According to equally influential
Nanette Salomon, the Tale of the Stain is “profoundly confusing the approach
to a sculpted Greek goddess, albeit the goddess of love, and the approach to a
sexually vulnerable woman … Praxiteles has created a goddess vulnerable in the
exhibition, whose primary definition is as one who does not wish to be seen. In
fact, being seen is here undeniably connected with being violated. Praxiteles has
installed in us much more than the controlling male gaze. He has transformed
the viewer into a voyeur.”47
The manifesto of feminist Classical Archaeology, Naked Truths. Woman,
Sexuality, and Gender in Classical Art and Archaeology, was published in 1997. In
the opening chapter, we read: “The fetishistic quality of the sculpture (Knidia)
is captured by Pliny and the Lucian in the anecdote about a man, overcome
with desire, whose semen stained the marble flesh after he spent a night in the
temple. In this story, Aphrodite’s status as the goddess of love is confounded
and diminished in a discourse of mortal lust. Her statue becomes a political
and social construction of the male gaze which functioned both to encourage
heterosexual desire and to regulate female eroticism in the service of the maledominated
city-state.”48 The expressive formulation “semen stained the marble
flesh” is characteristic of the conception of Knidia as an alter ego of the Greek
female. In the ancient tale, semen stained the marble, but the ultimate target
was female flesh, not only of those living in Ancient Greece, but also of contemporary
women. In Salomon’s contribution in Naked Truths, we read that
Praxiteles’s Knidia “is reduced in a humiliated way to her sexuality.” What is
more, the statue is responsible for “the continued and incessant idealization of
female humiliation in the Western tradition from ca. 340 BCE to the present”.49
In feminist literature, Knidia is “embarrassed” because she is “sexually vulnerable”.
Johann Jakob Bernoulli, the author of the first monograph on Knidia,
was the first to present the idea that Knidia responded to her nudity.50 The damsel
in distress stopped, looked back and moved her hand to cover her genitals.
According to Heleniak, Knidia “shows the modest Venus (normally clothed)
reaching for her drapery at her bath. Her nudity is circumstantial and momentary
– unlike the permanent nude statue of male gods. The viewer/voyeur must
glimpse her before she restores her covering … (Knidia) established one of the
most potent images of the female nude: the bather caught unaware.” We are told
that, in daily life, Greek men used the rare occasion when women took off their
clothes to bathe to spy on them and eventually abuse them sexually. In the Tale
of the Stain, the mortal woman was replaced by a statue of goddess Aphrodite,
but the asymmetrical relationship of the sexes faithfully reflected Greek reality.
As Heleniak stressed, “the erotic appeal of this statue (that is Knidia) for male
viewers, is confirmed by early writings that describe men kissing the statue or
leaving more telling stains behind after their visits to the shrine”. The use of
the plural in this sentence implies that Greek men repeatedly stained the statue
of a female nude in the Knidos sanctuary.
Laura Salah Nasrallah considered the story ascribed to Lucian as “facetious”.51
Nevertheless, or because of it, she takes it at face value. According to her, “the
story reveals both the power and the vulnerability of the stone goddess”.52 In
another publication, she formulated it similarly: “the story reveals not only the
power of the beautiful goddess, but also her material vulnerability, her enslavement
to stone and her gendered subjection … In the second century, the Knidia
is thus discussed in gendered language that highlights her connection with flagrant
sexuality on the one hand and her sexual vulnerability on the other”.53
How should we understand the phrase “her enslavement to stone”? Aphrodite
was a slave in stone – unable to move? ANY god represented in sculpture was
“enslaved to stone”!
In the first decades of the 21st century, the thesis of Knidia’s “vulnerability”
may be carried ad absurdum. “Not only is the Knidia unable to prevent
the gaze of the male voyeur due to her lack of autonomy, but she is also essentially
subjected to a physical assault … Praxiteles, whether intentionally or not,
portrays the Knidian Aphrodite, and thus the goddess herself, as a weak being,
characterised as a human woman lacking autonomy, rather than the authoritative
goddess depicted in cult and literature … Aphrodite’s nudity is purely gra-
tuitous, for male visitors to satisfy their scophophilic tendencies by seeing her
as a sexual object. In being spied upon, reduced to her sexuality and her individual
body parts, she is oppressed and left powerless.”54 In Knidia, we read in
this dissertation, Praxiteles represented Aphrodite as a victim of sexual abuse.
At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, the feminist interpreters of Knidia
were divided into two irreconcilable camps. In the one, the statue was seen exclusively
as a passive object of male sexual fantasies and brutal assaults. In the
other, it is presented as an important agent of female self-identification and glorification.
Lives of Greek women, wrote Kampen, “depended on being cared for
by men, men whom they had to hold by means sensual and procreative as well
as legal and economic. And Aphrodite had the power to help them to do so”.55
In her article of 2009, Kampen argued: “We need to multiple interpretations
of the Knidia that are rooted in acknowledgment of the multiplicity of viewers.
This means that the goddess, her ambiguity of pose and demeanor reinforcing
this need, can indeed be understood through the lens of male desire, homosocial
and heterosexual alike, and it means that for some viewers touristic and
voyeuristic motives are primary. Masochism and abjection are possible, but so
is a kind of glorious modelling of the desirable woman in her own interests as
bride, wife, mother, and as prostitute or courtesan as well. Whether the statue
was intended to evoke male desire, to suggest the marriage bath, or hint at the
uncovering of sacred things in a process of mystic revelation, it requires study
that attends not to some universalising reception theory but to particularities
of time, place, and social location of worshipper.”56
In this new reading, Knidia is no longer presented as weak, ashamed and embarrassed.
“The Knidia is constructed as an authoritative sexual being, a woman
in control of both her own sexuality and the men under her sway.”57 Mireille M.
Lee argues that the main purpose of Knidia was to educate women how to employ
their femininity.58 “The Knidian Aphrodite demonstrates various dress practices
that would have been easily recognized by female viewers as sources of feminine
erotic power – the manipulation of her garment, carefully arranged coiffure, expensive
jewellery, and care of the body in the form of bathing and depilation. The
Knidian Aphrodite thus provided a model for feminine agency: by performing
such practices themselves, women were promised the protection of the goddess
in the form of sexual desirability. The messages of the Knidia would have been
especially potent for hetairai, for whom sexual desirability was essential to their
livelihoods.”59 Lee thus stresses the didactic nature of the Knidia. It was, so to
speak, a mannequin; its numerous copies served as a teaching aid used to model
feminine behaviour. Lee refused to take the ancient textual evidence on Knidia
at face value: “while it is certainly the case that the literary sources describe male
responses to the statue as if they were the active partners – or at least voyeuristic
‘Peeping Toms’ – this could not have been the intended response on the part of
Praxiteles in his creation of a cult statue that was the focus of religious devotion,
even if she is the goddess of love.”60 This is a clear indication that the popularity
of the Tale of the Stain is declining in feminist circles today.
It is to be noted that the Tale of the Stain has largely been ignored in continental
Europe. It is not even mentioned, either in the monumental French
catalogue of Praxiteles,61 or in German monographs on Knidia.62 It is cited in
passing in a recent German book on nudity in art.63 In Zimmer’s monograph
on the Hellenistic copies of Knidia, it is alluded to, but the stain is not mentioned.
This is all the more surprising when we realise that the author takes the
text of Erotes at face value. From the formulation “stretching out his neck as
far as he could, started to kiss the goddess with importunate lips”, she deduced
that the statue was slightly larger than life size.64 The vogue of the Tale of Stain
thus began, developed and ended in the USA and Great Britain, in connection
with a feminist re-evaluation of Western cultural tradition.
Masculinist View
The story of Knidia’s stain which assumed a masculinist viewpoint was elaborated
in feminist territory, but soon afterwards the traditional masculinist view
of Knidia was vigorously restated. In 1994, Robine Osborne wrote provocatively:
“Rich though the message of this statue is about male sexuality, it has very
little to say about female sexuality.”65 Osborne does not mention the above-
mentioned early feminist reading of Knidia,66 but reacts to the, at that time, influential
feminist interpretations of female nudes in art.67 From ancient literary
sources, he draws three conclusions concerning Knidia. “First, that the statue
is said to induce an overtly sexual thrill in the viewer … Second, the high priority
on seing the statue from all around … Third … that the statue was modelled
on a mistress of Praxiteles.”68 From these three points, he concludes that the
“viewer … is assumed to be male”. The Knidian Aphrodite should “be seen to
play upon male desire, male sexuality, and male expectations and values, and
to say nothing to women”.69
Osborne reads the statue not in terms of female humiliation, but of male
desire and male religiosity, for he presents Knidia as an epiphany of Aphrodite.
“When the young man in the story variously told by Pliny and by Lucian was
so smitten with Praxiteles’ naked Aphrodite of Knidos that he left his mark
on the marble … he does make love to it, the statue was what had inspired his
passion. In a very real sense, and however hard time he had, the statue was for
him.”70 In the footnote, he adds: “When the story in pseudo-Lucian ends with
his throwing himself off the cliff and down into the waves, it is tempting to
see the detail that his body was never again seen as an acknowledgement that
Aphrodite had indeed duly received him.”
According to Osborne, Praxiteles “offered the worshipper a number of different
angles of view which corresponded with potentially different narrative positions
– as an invited lover, as the stranger blundering in to a private moment,
as an unseen voyeur. All these together served to tease those who came to the
temple with the possibility that Aphrodite was theirs, whether as a picture or
as a body, while at the same time leaving it impossible either to confirm that
chance or to rule it out.”71 Nigel Spivey also sees the Tale of the Stain as typical
of the Greek attitude to the depiction of the female nude in monumental
sculpture. We read that the tale was an “account of touristic responses to the
Knidian Aphrodite”,72 and that “the statue at Knidos evoked erotic responses
from those who went to see it”.73 The Tale of the Stain “seems to provide an
authentic account of what it was like to visit the Knidian temple in Roman
times”.74 In this respect, the extreme position is represented by Antonio Corso,
according to whom the love of Praxiteles’s statue was in fact institutionalised in
Knidos. “The cult involved the assertion of love for the statue by distinguished
men, usually of noble blood.”75 The Knidian men publically proclaimed their
love of Knidia and the result of their zeal culminated in the case of a man who
copulated physically with the marble statue. Corso even dated this event. According
to him, it took place in the second half of the third century BC.76
From the male-oriented point of view, Knidia offers pleasure, but also represents
a threat. Michael Squire writes about Lucian’s tale: “There are hints that the
viewed female object controls the situation after all. Consider what becomes of
the story’s protagonist. The poor man finds out the hard way, that the Knidian
Aphrodite is more (and indeed less!) than just a statue. In some sense, it is the
Pygmalion story turned tragic … Praxiteles’ image … punishes her assailant.”77
According to Ovid, Pygmalion was enamoured with an ebony statue of a woman
he had created.78 The connection between Knidia and Pygmalion’s statue was
indicated in Ovid’s text by the fact that the story takes place in Cyprus, the
island of Aphrodite. Pygmalion asked the goddess to transform his statue into
a living woman and his wish was fulfilled. Out of this union, a girl was born
whose name was Paphos. She gave her name to the Cypriot city in which Aphrodite
was venerated for the first time, according to Greek tradition.79
Andrew Stewart stressed the fictional nature of the Tale of the Stain: “Principal
point is to expose the absurdity of conflating Aphrodite and her image
by contrasting the stain (a blemish in the stone?) with flawless white marble
of the goddess’s body.”80 However, at the same time, Stewart regarded the fact
that, for Ancient Greeks, the tale demonstrated the necessity to keep up with
the “Greek project of female containment”. According to him, Praxiteles’s Aphrodite
“had simultaneously to acknowledge the protocols of female modesty
laid down by the public eye; overwhelm the eroticized glance with her irresistible
sexuality; and yet still maintain her distance and dignity as a goddess.”
That is why the statue is naked, but has a smooth pubic triangle in place of the
vulva: “in order to shield her body from the male spectator’s penetrating glance
– or worse. If justification were needed for that omission, the story of stain
supplies it.”81
Already in his article of 1994, Osborne noted that “the direction of Aphrodite’s
gaze ensures that there are always three people present – Aphrodite, the
object of her gaze, and a ‘voyeur.’”82 In his book of 1997, Stewart reacted to the
feminist critique of the tradition of the exclusively male viewer and recipient of
Knidia by his concept of two male viewers, which together with Knidia form a
kind of love triangle.83 Recently, he formulated his idea as follows: “while a naïve
spectator would see only a beautiful, naked goddess nonchalantly shielding her
genitals and turning away from him, a perceptive one would sense a second visitor
to the shrine: someone off to the right at whom she looks and smiles. The
drachma drops. Could this unseen intruder be Aphrodite’s irascible, implacable
lover: the blood-soaked, man-slaughtering … Ares?! (‘Run away! Run Away!’).”84
According to Lee, “Stewart’s problematic account of ‘the spectator as both
worshipper and voyeur’ is resolved if the viewer is in fact female: a female worshipper
would gaze upon the Knidia, whose sideways glance towards a (presumed
male) object invited the devotee to turn her own attentions towards a human
love object in an act of religious devotion. Seen in this way, the viewer’s experience
of the Knidian Aphrodite is neither sexual nor voyeuristic, but a potent
reminder of the power of the goddess”.85
In past decades, research on Knidia has resulted in many new issues and
problems. For whom was Knidia created? Who was the assumed viewer, a man
or a woman? Who was looking at whom? As Michael Squire put it, Lucian’s
text “unleashes a panoply of unsettling questions. Does the viewer lord over
the statue, or does the statue control the viewer? Is this an image, or a goddess?
Do we look at Aphrodite, or does she look at you (looking at her looking at
you looking at her looking at you …)?”86
What do the Legend of Knidia Convey?
Let us assume that the legends of Knidia do not provide information either
about the appearance and staging of this marble statue, or the way in which
actual visitors behaved in its sanctuary. What can we say about Knidia? We may
start with what Lucian wrote about this statue in his Essays on Portraiture. In
this text from the 2nd century AD, the Empress protested when her beauty was
compared with that of Knidia, which she considered as blasphemy. The author
defended himself as follows:
I did not, dear lady, compare you to goddesses, but to the handiwork in marble
and bronze and ivory of certain good artists. There is no impiety, surely,
in illustrating mortal beauty by the work of mortal hands – unless you take
the thing that Phidias fashioned to be indeed Athene, or Praxiteles’s not much
later work at Cnidus to be the heavenly Aphrodite. But would that be quite a
worthy conception of divine beings? I take the real presentment of them to be
beyond the reach of human imitation.87
Lucian argued that Knidia is a work of art, a worked piece of stone, consequently
it would be foolish to identify it with “the heavenly Aphrodite” (τὴν οὐρανίαν
Ἀφροδίτην). Olympian gods are invisible and therefore people cannot imitate
their forms. The link between divinities and their statues is arbitrary, as Plato
stressed in his last dialogue, written roughly at the same time in which Praxiteles
created his statue of Aphrodite:
Some of the gods, whom we honour we see clearly, but of others we set up
statues as images, believing that when we honour these, lifeless though they be,
the living gods feel great good-will and gratitude towards us.88
The gods people see clearly are celestial bodies, like the Sun or Moon, all other
gods are worshipped as statues. Gods are “living” (ἐμψύχους), but their statues
are “lifeless” (ἀψύχους), they are things, nevertheless gods acknowledge that
people who honour these objects, honour them. Moreover, in the Hellenistic
and Roman worlds, the pre-5th century BC belief persisted that statues somehow
impersonate gods and can perform actions, albeit very limited.89 It is to
be stressed in this connection that we never hear about the agency of Knidia.
In the above-mentioned anecdotes, this statue always remained what it was, a
piece of marble. The statue of Aphrodite at Knidos never responded, even when
a visitor behaved towards it as if it was a living being. In ancient sources from
the Roman period, love of statues was mentioned several times. But it is to be
stressed that this behaviour was considered exceptional and not socially approved
of: “Total self-abandonment on the part of the beholder was condemned.”90
Seen in this perspective, Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway offered a rigorous yet
rich definition of Knidia: “It was a religious icon … not narrative or anecdotal
but symbolic and powerful, an object of awe in its nudity used as an attribute
… the goddess – in an epiphanic rather than a momentary pose … pointed to
her reproductive organs … Her image at superhuman size, aloof and unconcerned,
dangerous because naked, would have inspired respect and even fear in
those, male and female alike, who went to her temple openly to worship – not
pruriently to peep, since the consequences of seeing a goddess naked against
her will were terrible and well known in antiquity.”91
The Tale of the Stain was primarily about the danger which an encounter
with Aphrodite results in. The story of Pygmalion was the exception. The majority
of tales on agalmatophilia in which divinities were involved ended badly.92
Aelian tells the story of an unhappy Athenian who fell in love with the cult
statue and committed suicide:
A young man at Athens, of a good Family, fell desperately in love with the statue
of Agathe Tyche (Good Fortune), which stood before the Prytaneum. He often
would embrace and kiss it; at last transported with mad desire, he came to the
Senate, and desired that he might purchase it at any rate. But not obtaining his
suit, he crowned it with many garlands and ribbons, offered sacrifice, put upon
it a very rich garment, and, after he had shed innumerable tears, killed himself.93
Erotes is exceptional in the horrible way the lover of Knidia ended up. The author
stated that “according to the popular story” the desperate fellow is said to “have
hurled himself over a cliff or down into the waves of the sea”. For Greeks and
Romans, solemn and proper funeral rites were essential. The worst nightmare
was to die at sea where the corpse would disappear, but this was precisely the
case of this young man, whose body is said to “have vanished utterly”.94 It was
certainly not accidental that the two kinds of disposal of the corpse mentioned
in the text were part of the capital punishment reserved for the worst kinds of
wrong-doers. “Temple-robbers and their like were denied the individual’s right
to burial by throwing their corpses into the sea … or down a precipice.”95 According
to Erotes, the young man who stained Knidia ended up, through his
own doing, like a temple-robber.
The fact that the lover of Knidia threw himself “into the ocean waves” (κατὰ
πελαγίου κύματος) may connect his death with Aphrodite, who was born from
the ocean. This interpretation is corroborated by ancient epigrams in which the
goddess reacts to Praxiteles’s work. In one epigram on Knidia of an uncertain
date, we read that she visited the island to see Praxiteles’s statue for herself:96
Paphian Kythereia came through the waves to Knidos, wishing to see her very
own image, and having viewed it from all sides in its open shrine, she cried:
“Where did Praxiteles see me naked?” Praxiteles did not look on forbidden
things, but the iron carved the Paphian goddess just as Ares wanted her.97
What interests us is the statement that “Praxiteles did not look on forbidden
things” (Πραξιτέλης οὐκ εἶδεν ἃ μὴ θέμις). Ausonius retold the story in the 4th
century AD, and also explicitly said that to see a naked goddess is a sin (nefas):
When real Venus saw the Venus of Cnidus she said: “Praxiteles, I think you saw
me naked.” “I did not, nor was it right (non vidi nec fas), for me to, but polish
all my works with iron. Iron is under the sway of Mars Gradivus. So my iron
rasps made the Cytherean into one they knew would please her husband.” 98
In both epigrams, the same strategy is used to defend the sculptor who represented
the goddess as naked. Since mortals cannot see a goddess unclothed, the
responsibility was transferred from the sculptor to his tool. The statue was not
crafted by Praxiteles, but by an iron chisel. The hand of the sculptor was guided
by Ares, who was the Patron of iron and all tools made of it. The epigram thus
explains how it was possible that Praxiteles created the statue of the naked god-
dess and yet was not punished. The strategy was borrowed from ancient ritual
practice, in which a knife with which a priest killed a sacrificial animal was accused
and tried for its death.99 The same problem, that is a representation of
that which must not be represented, was the topic of another epigram credited
to Parmenion:
Polycleitus of Argos, who alone saw Hera with his eyes, and moulded what he
saw of her, revealed her beauty to mortals as far as was lawful; but we, the unknown
forms beneath her dress’s folds, are reserved for Zeus.100
The epigram was aptly characterised by Barkan as the first vagina monologue.101
It was Hera’s genitals, “unknown forms” (ἄγνωστοι μορφαὶ), which declared that
they could be seen only by Zeus. We may note in passing that the formulation
“unknown forms” would perfectly describe the peculiar way Aphrodite’s genitals
were perhaps rendered in the statue of Praxiteles. To see a goddess may blind a
mortal,102 as demonstrated by the myth of Teiresias.103 A single look at a naked
goddess may cost a man his life, which the myth of Actaeon demonstrated.104
In the hymn of Aphrodite, which originated in the 8th century BC, Aphrodite
pretends she is a mortal princess because she wants to seduce Anchises. If he
had known she was a goddess, he would never have slept with her. They made
love and after Anchises had fallen asleep, Aphrodite got dressed, woke her lover
and disclosed her divine status.105 Anchises saw her fully dressed, nevertheless he
averted his eyes and covered them, which he explained by saying that he feared
losing his masculinity as punishment for his transgression. Aphrodite forced
Anchises never to tell anybody about their love. However, he did not keep his
word and was punished for this.106 Sexual contact with the goddess of Love was
always fatal to mortals.107
The nakedness of Aphrodite and the possible absence of the rendering of her
genitals could be thus closely connected. The omitted vulva could be a condi-
tion sine qua non of the new image of the goddess. An analogous phenomenon
was the veiling of Greek women. In the 5th century BC, women left the closely
watched private realms of their husband or father’s houses. When Greek women
started to appear in public, the process of their veiling started, which culminated
in the second half of the 4th century BC. In the time Knidia was created, when
leaving their homes Greek women showed only their eyes. The rest of the body,
hands and feet included, had to be covered.108 Analogically, when Aphrodite
appeared naked in the monumental sculpture, her genitals probably had to be
covered by the artistic convention.
In the 4th century BC, representations of Aphrodite, the erotic aspects and
aesthetic qualities intensified proportionately to distance the statue from the
divine sphere. Nevertheless, Praxiteles perhaps intentionally created an approximate
shape of naked Aphrodite. Anecdotes of the sculptor’s lover, who was
the model for the statue of the goddess, stressed this fact. The dissimilarity between
the statue and the sculptor’s mistress guaranteed its link to Aphrodite.109
All those who came to see the statue were also safely protected from the fate of
Tiresias and Actaeon, who were punished because they had looked at a naked
goddess. Alongside the myths of these unfortunate mortals, we must put the
legend of the nameless young man who decided to spend the night with Knidia.
Foucault was correct: it was a “meaningful anecdote”.
The idea of the Ancient Greek and Roman statues of gods was “to establish
real contact with the world beyond, to actualise it, to make it present, and
thereby to participate intimately in the divine; yet by the same move, it must
also emphasise what is inaccessible and mysterious in divinity, its alien quality,
its otherness”.110 This attitude was deeply rooted in ancient tradition and survived
up to the very end of classical antiquity. Damascius (c. 458 – after 538),
the last of the Neoplatonists, reported that when he saw a statue of Aphrodite
in Athens, he was overcome by divine terror so great that he fell into a sweat.111
Early Christians reacted to this attitude by proclaiming that pagan statues are
inhabited by demons and had to be destroyed or mutilated.112 Quodvultdeus, a
fifth-century church father and bishop of Carthage, noted the story of a young
girl who saw a statue of naked Venus in public baths. When the girl imitated
the pose of Venus, a demon possessed her. The demon was exorcised and the
statue destroyed.113 An alternative way to neutralise these demons seems to be
to carve a cross on statues of pagan gods.114
Knidia was not Aphrodite, nevertheless it cannot be separated from her.
“The living gods” wrote Plato, “feel great good-will and gratitude” when they
see that people honour their statues.115 Conversely, by dishonouring cult statues,
mortals humiliate the gods. We are told that, after the night with Knidia, the
young man committed suicide. The openly fictional story of Pygmalion shows
that Aphrodite might be full of sympathy for the sculptor who fell in love with
the statue he had created. On the other hand, the equally fictional story about
Knidia shows that the lover of Knidia, lifeless though it was, had to be punished
because it was essential to maintain the prestige of the goddess.
The story of Knidia’s lover was neither about men nor women, but rather
about the goddess. We may use ancient stories on statues of gods and goddesses
as historical documents, as tools to understand ancient sculpture and its reception
by ancient Greeks and Romans, but we must not forget that they believed
in their divinities. We must assume that they knew what was and was not acceptable
behaviour face to face with a statue of Aphrodite. Any interpretation
of the Tale of Stain must take into account that its original audience was aware
of two things about Knidia. First, this statue was not Aphrodite. Second, Aphrodite
knew about it very well and this was crucial, it was a work of art with
tremendous sacred power. The religious aspects of the story of lover of Knidia
are to be taken seriously.
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Summary
This paper analyses the story about a young lover who left the semen mark on
the marble statue of Knidia by Praxiteles. The findings are threefold. First, we
show that the literal interpretation of this ancient story began in the seventies
of the 20th century, in connection with a feminist re-evaluation of Western cultural
tradition. Second, we argue that the ancient story cannot be taken at face
value. The story of Knidia’s lover does not provide information either about
the appearance and staging of this marble statue, or the way in which actual
visitors behaved in its sanctuary at Knidos. Third, we stress that any interpretation
of the Tale of Stain must take into account that its original audience was
aware that it was a work of art with tremendous sacred power.
Keywords: Aphrodite; Knidia; Praxiteles; feminism
JAN BAŽANT
Centre for Classical Studies at the Institute of Philosophy
Czech Academy of Sciences
Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Prague 1
Czech Republic
bazant@ics.cas.cz
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