Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
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Aphrodite
Modified in the decades around 300 B.C. and thereafter.
The head and neck were made separately to be inserted in the hollow between the shoulders. The left arm appears to have been attached with a dowel at the shoulder, while the right arm was joined in a similar manner a little farther down the start of the upper arm. The legs are missing above the knees. The dent on the lower part of the left hip, at the break, could be the remains of a strut connecting with an upside-down dolphin or a draped urn, the usual attributes of Aphrodite.
This Aphrodite is a sensitive version of the type best represented by the Aphrodite of the Troad in the Museo Nazionale Romano, from the Palazzo Chigi, a second century A.D. copy of the Hellenistic prototype. The Aphrodite of the Troad, so inscribed on the Chigi copy (together with the information that Menophantos made the original or, more likely, this copy), is related to the Aphrodite in the Museum at Cyrene. The Cyrene statue, which has a large, inverted dolphin against the lower hip (the end of the tail) and the left leg (the creature's body), goes back through the Aphrodite of the Museo Capitolino in Rome to the original of the Medici Venus in the Tribuna of the Uffizi in Florence.
Along the roads back from the Aphrodite of the Troad and the Aphrodite of Cyrene to the work of Lysippos (the Capitoline Aphrodite) or the creativity of Skopas (the Medici Venus), there were statues in cities from Attica to Asia Minor and beyond which mixed the proportions, details, attributes, and supports of a variety of Aphrodites. By various routes, they all arrived finally at the great source for all such figures of the goddess of love and beauty, portrayed as if stepping from her sponge bath or the sea, namely the Knidia of Praxiteles, made around 350 to 340 B.C.
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
