Praxiteles in Paris

Just three days before leaving for the Getty I took myself to Paris to see a new exhibition at the Louvre on the Greek sculptor Praxiteles. Not just myself, actually –this was a day trip we organised for our third-year Classics students at Newnham. You can just about squeeze seven Parisian hours in, if you leave London at 9.00 and take the last Eurostar back in the evening.

The idea is that it’s fun and bonding, a reward for hard work and ‘good behaviour’, plus a kick start to their revision for the final exams. Praxiteles is spot-on relevant to most of them. Some are taking our paper on the Classical Body in art. He’s a key figure in that, partly because it’s generally thought that he was the Greek sculptor who in the fourth century BC produced the first female nudes (his ‘Aphrodite of Cnidos’ usually takes the prize for being the very first).

Others are doing a paper on Sexual Ethics, and he comes in there too – largely because of stories the ancients told about this particular Aphrodite. One of the most extraordinary of all passages of Greek literature is found in a work (“Erotes” or “Loves”) by Lucian, the second century AD essayist. It is discussion between a couple of men, around this very statue, on the topic of whether the love of girls or of boys is preferable. Or to put it another way, do you admire the front or the back of the Aphrodite? In the course of the discussion one of them tells the story of a poor young boy of Cnidos who fell in love with the statue of the goddess, got himself locked into her temple and made love to her, leaving a tell-tale stain on the marble on the front of her thigh (and front is crucial to the argument, of course).

Praxiteles is in principle, then, a great subject for an exhibition. The only trouble is that with the exception of a statue of Hermes at Olympia (and there’s a question mark over even that) no certain original work of his survives.

So how do you make an exhibition?

The Louvre curators have actually done very well. They haven’t got the Olympia Hermes, but they have got a few pieces that have been claimed to be Praxiteles and probably aren’t (like a wonderful head from Petworth House, which I’d still like to think had a sporting chance of being the real thing).

What they really focus on though are the various versions of Praxiteles’ famous pieces that were produced throughout antiquity – some no doubt relatively close copies, some variations on a theme. So they have gathered together a better clutch of Roman ‘Aphrodites of Cnidos’ than I’ve ever seen before. This did cause one of my colleagues who has also seen the show to remark that it felt a bit like a garden centre (the kind that has loads of plastic statuary lined up). But for the students it was a great opportunity to see the differences in at first sight very similar pieces. It really does matter, for example, exactly where Aphrodite is putting her hand. Is she pointing to or covering up her genitals?

They also explore the whole idea of the ‘Praxitelean style’ (lithe, languorous, twisting turning) as it has been reworked from antiquity to the present day. This gives them the excuse for displaying what is in some ways the star of the show – this wonderful bronze dancing satyr found in 1997 in “international waters” between Sicily and Africa. Made some time between the fourth century BC and . . . well the second century AD (dating bronze sculptures is very hard indeed), it’s absolutely stunning and brilliantly displayed. I hope it will be making an appearance in some of the students exam answers.

Praxitèle runs till the summer and is really worth a visit. You can book tickets on-line which lets you go into the museum by the little entrance in the Passage Richelieu, off the rue de Rivoli – and so avoid the queues of Da Vinci Code fans and others entering via the main pyramid entrance.

Comments

[Mary]

Oliver -- yes it was indeed the appropruately named Iris Love..and I didnt belive the idea that she had found the original temple of the Aphrodite..and it certainly doesnt fit with the descriptions...

Judith - we are going to have at look at this a bit harder. My own view was that (esp given the dialogue within a dialogue in the Lucian episode) that Foucault inter alios was over simplifying...but it is probably more complicated.

[judith@judithweingarten.com]

You wrote "leaving a tell-tale stain on the marble on the front of [Aphrodite's] thigh (and front is crucial to the argument, of course)"

I never realized how curious this was, so I checked my copy of ps-Lucian. In Erotes15, the woman-lover indeed says 'thigh (implicitly frontal) but then adds that he admires Praxiteles all the more for 'having hidden what was unsightly in the marble in the parts less able to be examined closely.' After which (17), the boy-lover smiles and says, that the lad 'made love to the marble as though to a boy, because... he didn't want to be confronted by the female parts.'

Am I confused or merely naive? Any help, anyone?

Judith
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[Oliver Nicholson]

More than 30 years ago, someone (was it Iris Love ?) made a claim to have discovered the Aphrodite of Cnidus in the great excavation in the basement of the British Museum. The fragment of a head was put on show on by the B.M. with one of those "You decide...." captions. I remember deciding I was underwhelmed - the fragment hardly excited the urges described by Lucian. Has this piece been forgotten about ?

[Candadai Tirumalai]

One cannot help but notice that Praxiteles allows himself more freedom in depicting the private anatomy of his supposed Hermes than in his Aphrodite. I had associated the fig-leaf with Christianity.
There are learned treatises on the characteristics of painting and sculpture but an obvious difference is that one can see both the front and back of a sculptural figure.