'An object of lust': How the ancient Greek goddess Aphrodite became a controversial symbol of love and sex

Artworks depicting Aphrodite, the ancient Greek goddess of love and beauty, have long been branded obscene, objectifying the female body. How did she become one of the most controversial figures in the history of art?

The nudity of Aphrodite (or Venus as she was known by the ancient Romans), has been a topic of debate for centuries.

In 1880, the shocked author Mark Twain called Titian's Venus of Urbino (1534) "the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses". In 1914, the suffragette Mary Richardson hacked Diego Velázquez's Rokeby Venus (c 1647-51) with a meat cleaver at least three times in the middle of London's National Gallery. "I didn't like the way men visitors gaped at it all day long," was one of her later explanations.

Aphrodite: The Making of a Goddess, a new exhibition at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, explores the history of the goddess. It helps to explain how she evolved into a lightning rod of such intense cultural controversy.

There are two versions of her origin story: a mythological one and a historically accurate one, and neither particularly marks her out as a future troublemaker. In myth, the tale begins with Kronos castrating his father Ouranos and flinging his genitals into the sea; foam began to bubble to the surface, and out of it arose a fully formed Aphrodite. She glided across the waves to the island of Cyprus, where her footsteps caused flowers to bloom miraculously from the land.

The historical version of Aphrodite's birth also begins on Cyprus, where she emerged as a deity around 1200BC. She was a distinctive new addition to the pantheon but had features that had apparently evolved from older Middle Eastern goddesses like Ishtar, Astarte and Hathor. For these archaic goddesses, "sexuality, love and fertility were their core characteristics," Anja Ulbrich, curator of the Ashmolean exhibition, tells the BBC, "but they all had more than one function".

And the same applied to Aphrodite, who in her early years wasn't just a goddess of romantic love, but of all physical love and procreation – in the animal and plant world as much as the human realm. And there are other, perhaps less well-known, sides to her persona. She fought in the Trojan War – and this warrior aspect of her personality led her to be worshipped by the ancient Greek navy.

Aphrodite can also claim to be the founder of the Roman civilisation, no less. One mythological narrative describes her affair with the Trojan prince Anchises; their son Aeneas fled to Italy after the fall of Troy – and his descendants were said to have established the city of Rome.

Following her original appearance on Cyprus back in the 13th Century BC, Aphrodite became a big hit with people, and worship of her spread all around ancient Greece. Why was she so appealing? "Fertility, love, procreation is a topic across humanity, no matter which culture," Ulbrich says. "One of her names is Pandemos: the goddess of all people. It's not just the warriors, or the women: love affects everybody and everything. It pervades life."

So far, so uncontroversial. For several hundred years, artists didn't make Aphrodite look particularly different from other female Olympian goddesses. And in her early years, they did not typically depict her naked, and certainly never in the more provocative poses we now associate with her. But then, in 350BC, an artwork appeared that changed everything.

Praxiteles's Aphrodite of Knidos (c 350BC) was the first completely nude artwork of a woman in ancient Greece. The original sculpture is lost, but we can get a good picture of what it looked like by later Roman copies like the Capitoline Venus (c 160BC).

Before Praxiteles, it was only male figures who were shown undressed. "Celebrating physical male beauty through nudity was perfectly normal from the 7th or 6th Century BC onwards," Ulbrich says. So, Praxiteles chose to do the same for female physical beauty.

Aphrodite's nudity was different. If you look closely, you can see how dissimilar the presentation of nudity is in Greek male sculptures: it's all in the body language. Praxiteles's Aphrodite is shown caught whilst bathing. She appears shy and vulnerable, covering herself in shame or embarrassment, whereas the nude male body in Greek art had always been shown as confident and heroic. Ulbrich explains: "It is mostly based on how she's presented in myths, where she is constantly bathing and working on her physical beauty."

But in Praxiteles's artwork, Aphrodite's hands are positioned slightly away from her, making it possible for a viewer to see her exposed body if they look at it from different angles. It's an artwork that invites interaction, and rewards the spectator for their sensual curiosity. These innovative artistic techniques would cause heated debate in centuries to come, and a name was coined for the pose of the Praxiteles's sculpture: the Venus Pudica (modest or shameful).

The Aphrodite of Knidos was "revolutionary," says Ulbrich. Before Praxiteles, Aphrodite might be recognisable in sculptures from a range of different items of clothing, jewellery and other attributes. Afterwards, he says, "the nudity basically takes over."

It's worth acknowledging that a naked body is completely natural, and not controversial in its own right. What would make Aphrodite so provocative in later years was not her being undressed, but how her body was posed for the gratification of a viewer. It turned her into an object of lust.

Praxiteles's original sculpture was so inspirational that it was later copied thousands of times by Roman sculptors, of which the Capitoline Venus is just one famous example. A new way of looking at women's bodies in art had been unleashed by the Venus Pudica, and it spread to all the territories governed by the Roman Empire including Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

But the influence was not restricted to the ancient world. During the Renaissance, artists began to seek out and copy classical sculptures with more determination than they had for a millennium. And one of the most admired was the Venus Pudica type. So, Aphrodite, in her nude, seductive and humble persona, as devised by Praxiteles, was reborn in artworks by Massaccio, Botticelli, Raphael and Titian – artists who would later become the "great names" of art history. Some artists used the pose to depict Aphrodite, but many adopted it for other types of female figure. It also inspired other artists to devise new poses based on the same essential premise of diffident nudity.

And so, via artists' repeated rehashing of the Venus Pudica, the objectified female form became an indelible feature of the art historical canon. Rubens and Velázquez reincarnated it in the Baroque period. It was revived by Cabanel and Manet in the 1800s, and by Modigliani and Yves Klein in the 20th Century. The outrage of Mark Twain and Mary Richardson are responses to this history of Aphrodite's eroticisation. 

Anja Ulbrich tells the BBC that the goddess has been depicted in many diverse ways, and that Praxiteles's sculpture shouldn't necessarily be our defining vision of her. One of the exhibits at the Ashmolean was made in Northumberland and shows Aphrodite bathing. At such a distance from the Mediterranean, Ulbrich says with a smile, "she looks pretty annoyed by the cold."

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In more recent times, and outside of Praxiteles's influence, Aphrodite is often cast differently, sometimes even as an icon of empowerment. In 2023, Beyoncé opened a concert by arriving on stage in a giant clam shell, wearing a dress decorated with Venus Pudica hands. Björk, Lady Gaga, Kylie Minogue and Bananarama have all written songs about the goddess.

As the symbol of ultimate beauty and desirability, Aphrodite has been adapted and reconfigured to reflect the needs of her audience for 3,000 years and counting, a remarkable lifespan for an ancient Greek deity. Another astonishing idea is that a single sculpture – Praxiteles's Aphrodite of Knidos – has shaped our attitudes to nudity so profoundly.

There's no sign of her dominance over mortal affairs ending, or her controversy subsiding – the subject of beauty and how it is handled will be forever relevant, and always up for debate, reflecting public opinion as it unfolds over time. "Depending on the context, people have just narrowed her down to what they need and what they want," says Ulbrich. "She is very versatile, you know."

Aphrodite: The Making of a Goddess is at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum until 11 April 2027

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