Aphrodite Marble Statue

Marble statue of Aphrodite History is often defined as the study of past events, which help us unlock and understand previous civilisations, and there are many ways in which to discover how it is passed on through generations. Archaeology is the study of culture through recovery and analysis of material remains, such as architecture, biofacts and artefacts. These physical objects often provide us with knowledge from the past that would have otherwise been lost, and they are the basis of how we recall history and live to tell it. Ceramics, jewellery, weapons, and tools, among others, find their way into museums to be looked at and admired, as a way to better understand our ancestral roots. As opposed to word-of-mouth tales, which risk exaggeration

These Roman replicas “go back with certainty to a Greek original in the post-Praxitelean style of about 300 B.C.” (Alexander, 245). After Praxiteles’s undraped Knidos, Aphrodite’s nude image became so popular that his students began creating depictions of their own. However, with the emerging artistic current overturning the classical canons, the “sculptors went their several ways, and their Aphrodites became eclectic or sentimentalised” (Alexander, 245). They began creating their own versions of the statue, inspired by the Hellenistic period’s prioritisation of movement, detail and expression over the traditional, yet boring paradigms of movements past. Nevertheless, the students returned to the original themes and reworked those first images. “As the creative impulse waned, they found it more profitable to copy the famous types than to invent new ones, and in doing so unwittingly preserved them from utter vanishment, in so far as they were able to reproduce them” (Alexander, 245). The Aphrodite of Knidos is lost, “but Roman copies of it exist, identified with the literary record by the statue on the Roman coinage of Knidos” (Alexander, 245), which means that without these copies, we may have never known it to exist. The copies turned out to be true images when the original was lost, and as aforementioned, an object believed as commonplace as a replica instead revealed a truth that could still be unknown to