Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
34
Small Statue of a Divine Female Personage, Aphrodite or a Nymph
Most of both arms, and he head and feet, are missing. The left breast is damaged, and there are chips on the drapery.
This small statue, existing in about twenty replicas, represented Aphrodite Pontia or Euploia and was used in Graeco-Roman times as a fountain figure, the water sometimes emerging from the dolphin serving as support at the left side. The original is thought to go back to the time of Praxiteles, about 350 BC, and may have stood in a temple by the sea, a smaller version (since the figure is only two-thirds lifesize) of the Aphrodite of Knidos. There are also, however, strong arguments in the diademed, draped head, the elongated body, and the hipshot pose for suggesting the original of these copies was created in the Hellenistic world, perhaps on the island of Rhodes, about 150 BC. Near mirror reversals of the type were created in late Hellenistic times and also copied.
She appears to have been represented as unveiling herself. She stands with the weight on her right leg, her hip thrown outward to give the body a strong S-curve. Her cloak starts behind the neck, falls down her back, and is bunched in folds on a line around the right hip to the front of the torso, falling again over the left thigh. The other end is tucked under the left arm, making a diagonal fold across the back. This Aphrodite was wearing a diadem above her hair and, often, the part of her cloak that passed up behind her shoulders as a veil over the back of her head. Her left arm, with a bracelet on the upper part, was lowered and extended, probably once holding a marine attribute such as a stylized wave. Her right arm was bent and appears to have touched and held up the heavy folds of drapery on an extended right hip. The presence of the diadem favors the identification as a goddess born from the sea rather than a nymph of the ocean or water.
The original statue was perhaps a bronze, but, like the Aphrodite of Knidos, it could have been a marble. The copy in the Galleria of the Museo Capitolino, slightly larger than most, has been transformed into a statue of a Roman lady of Domitian's time (AD 81-96) wearing her high, exaggerated hairstyle and sandals on the feet. This amusing distortion of the ultimate original may have served as a funerary statue, having been found outside the Porta San Sebastiano in an area where funerary monuments could take on what we would consider surprising pagan forms (Jones, 1912, pp. 127-128, no. 34, pl. 25). A statue in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, in about the same state of preservation as the Harvard statue, of uncertain provenance (perhaps Roman Hispania), demonstrates the widespread export of the type (considering Smyrna as the source of the statue acquired by Edward Forbes for Harvard University) (Blanco, 1957, pp. 71-72, no. 95-e, pl. xxxviii). A statue similar to the Forbes example was photographed in Zurich in a private collection, in 1962. The draped and diademed head is preserved. The provenance was said to have been the environs of Rome.
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
