James Baquet

    Of all the arts practiced by the Greeks — pottery and painting, architecture and metalwork — none has captured the admiration of later ages like that of sculpture.

    While few sculptures from the early days have remained, plenty of copies were made that can still be seen today. And few capture the imagination like the Aphrodite of Knidos (or Cnidus), created by Praxiteles of Athens.

    Little is known of this best of all 4th-century Greek sculptors. Even his birth and death dates are unknown, though it is assumed that he passed some time before 332 B.C., when Alexander the Great came to power. No commissions by Alexander were ever recorded, and he would certainly have engaged the services of this master.

    This means Praxiteles and Aristotle were contemporaries. Aristotle, who wrote on aesthetics, must have been familiar with the work of Praxiteles.

    Most or all of Praxiteles’s works depicted humans, or the human figures of the younger gods, like Hermes and Aphrodite. He seems to have avoided the more serious members of the Pantheon, like Zeus or Poseidon,

    The Aphrodite of Knidos is thought to be the first full-sized Greek representation not only of that goddess of love, but of any woman, ever created without clothes.

    There are numerous legends attached to this Aphrodite. One is that Praxiteles was fulfilling a commission from a town, and created one statue with clothes, the other without. The citizens were shocked, and rejected the nude figure. The clothed one they accepted has been forgotten.

    The people of Knidos then purchased the nude Aphrodite and proudly set her in an open-air temple, where she could be viewed from all sides.

    Another legend says that the model for this statue was Praxiteles’s lover, a courtesan (a sort of well-educated, high-class prostitute) named Phryne. She was famous in her own right, the subject of other works of art and a number of legends.

    One says that she was being tried in court on charges of impiety. When her lawyer’s arguments failed, they say, the lawyer disrobed her to the waist. The jury as so affected by her beauty that she was acquitted!

    Vocabulary

    Which word above means:

    1. took the clothes off of

    2. let go, declared “not guilty”

    3. the study of what is beautiful

    4. a statue, or the art of making statues

    5. requesting someone to make something for pay

    6. naked, without clothes

    7. building design

    8. people who lived at the same time