Modes of Viewing in Hellenistic Poetry and Art: And Art

6. Viewing Pleasure and Pain

6 Viewing Pleasure and Pain Of all the gods and heroes endowed with human traits in Hellenistic art and poetry, Aphrodite is pre-eminently and the most sensually so.1 Her novel nakedness in the late Classical Cnidia (see Ill. 9), which was especially admired at least in later antiquity for its equally gratifying viewability from all angles, heralds a new attitude to the female figure, and a new genre in the art of the Hellenistic period which enthusiastically followed the Cnidia’s example.2 The metamorphosis of her son from a slim young man into the Hellenistic putto with whom we most readily identify the god nowadays fits naturally enough into the new taste for “child art.” Behind his apparent accessibility and vulnerability, however , there often lies an unstated but implied power and potential cruelty. In this last he is truly his mother’s son, for it is likely that even in the Cnidia the goddess’s might was a potent subtext. Just how are we to read the Hellenistic artists’ innovations in the iconography of Eros and Aphrodite? Here again the written word and written narrative of the poets can help us appreciate the range of associations and responses that were current in the age and might underlie the artistic images. They can, moreover, give us a clearer idea of the means by which visual art achieved these effects. The first thing to note is the remarkably parallel manner in which poets and artists avail themselves of genre-crossing and genre-marking (in the case of poetry) and citing and mixing iconographical traditions (in the case of art) to achieve their new effects . The art involving Eros and Aphrodite has never before been 144 analyzed from this vantage point, which has been used exclusively for the criticism of poetry. The presentation of the goddess in the sculpture of the Hellenistic age in fact provides us with many examples of the strategy. Its ancestry reaches back at least to Phidian practice, as seen on the East Pediment of the Parthenon (Ill. 32). There we have the famous motifs of the goddess’s voluptuous reclining pose and the drapery falling off her right shoulder . Elements of the presentation of the goddess’s sexuality are indeed present. The cue is perhaps taken up in the Fréjus Aphrodite of around 410 b.c. (Ill. 33), whose left breast is bare and whose drapery might as well not exist. But it is Praxiteles’ Cnidian Aphrodite of between 350 and 340, with the goddess depicted nude before or after her bath, which takes the final step on the path to full nudity. The balance toward total nudity in a representation of a goddess is tilted tentatively in the Fréjus Aphrodite, but tipped firmly in the Cnidia. The drastic break with traditional representations of the goddess and the well-documented response of the Coans who took the draped option3 can be appreciated fully only when we consider the traditional expectations entertained of a representation of a divine epiphany: traditionalism as much as prudishness is likely to have guided their decision.And this flouting of expectations is as likely as anything else to explain the statue’s appeal to the Hellenistic taste. As we have seen, breaking with traditional expectations became a vital element in the age’s special creativity in both representative art and poetry. To name only one example in Hellenistic art, we have, from admittedly perhaps as late as the first century, according to Havelock’s impressive down-dating,4 the Capua Aphrodite (see Ill. 14), whose upper torso is bare down to the right slope of the mons Veneris. R. R. R. Smith detects “revisionist ‘modesty’” in the drapery,5 but Ridgway is probably correct to conclude that “the conception of the bare female torso re- flected in a shield does not convey a spirit of modesty, and the residual clothing acts as a foil rather than as a cover.”6 In the more private arts, too, the shift of emphasis in the portrayal of Aphrodite is very evident. We have, for instance, the “domestic” Aphrodite scenes in fourth-century vase-painting. The Meidias Painter’s hydria, with Adonis casually reclining on the goddess’s body, and Aphrodite sitting on his knee amid Viewing Pleasure and Pain 145 attendant female figures who play with a mirror or a pet bird, is a good example for us. The scene...