1. References to all epigrams accord to those given in the Loeb edition of the Greek Anthology, Vol. 5, tr. W.R. Paton (London and New York 1918Google Scholar). Epigrams devoted to the Aphrodite of Knidos number 16.159–170. For further ancient texts on the sculpture, see Pollitt (1965), 84–88.

2. See Arscott and Scott (2000), 5: ‘Since Venus is pre-eminent in beauty, as well as in sexual love, her presence in art triggers a meditation on the domain of the aesthetic. The special power of art can be presented and contemplated in terms of the libidinal sway of the goddess.’

3. For the influence and re-presentation of Venus statues in Western art, see the catalogue of the Louvre’s excellent 2000 exhibition, Cuzin et al. (2000), particularly 462–67 (‘Dalí, la Vénus de Milo et la persistence de la mémoire antique’).

4. Tragically, the original sculpture was destroyed in a fire in Constantinople in 476 CE, and we know the statue today only through a number of Roman ‘copies’, miniatures and representations on coins, with which art historians have attempted to reconstruct the original. For recent studies of the Knidian Aphrodite, see Havelock (1995); Stewart (1997), 86–105; Osborne (1998), 230–35.

5. For a commentary, see Corso (1988) 24f., 42–44, 91–93, 127–40. For a discussion of these texts, see Osborne (1994); Elsner (1991); Stewart (1997), 86–105.

6. Lucian Amores 16: ‘The youth concerned is said…to have hurled himself over a cliff or down into the waves of the sea and to have vanished utterly.’

7. See Allen et al. (1936), 363f.

8. See Stewart (1997), 86–105.

9. Elsner (1991), 157: ‘The brilliance, or perversity, of this ancient image-panegyric is that the same female statue can function simultaneously as the object of male homo- and heterosexual desire. This is a spectacular example of the transgressive nature of an ancient god.#x2019;

10. As Nicole Loraux has written, ‘Aphrodite incarnates the immediacy of realised desire, the very image of “love made flesh”…. More powerful than all appearances, her body is always visible’ (Loraux [1990a], 197). For a more explicitly feminist response to the Knidia, see Salomon (1997).

11. Contrast the symbolic meaning attributed to the armless state of the Venus de Milo: ‘In her blatant imperfection she perfectly personifies the disturbance, the inevitably shattering effects, of desire on the wholeness and wholesomeness of tradition’ (Arscott and Scott [2000], 5).

12. Plato is said to have lived from 429 to 347 BCE. Ekphrastic epigrams playing with the deceptive powers of naturalism became particularly popular from the late Hellenistic period, as a sub-genre of the more ‘rhetorical’ epideictic epigrams which dominate the first century CE Garland of Philip, in contrast to the more erotic subject-matter of the Hellenistic Garland of Meleager. The ekphrastic poems have survived in the Anthologia Planudea and are collected in Book 16 of the Greek Anthology. See Gow and Page (1968) and Cameron (1993). Lawton (1923), 91, comments of The Garland of Philip, ‘Yet there is little of Nature in it, and quite too much of curious Art…’

13. For a (regrettably brief) study of the Myron’s Cow series, see Goldhill (1994), 197–223; also Gutzwiller (2001), 85–112. Gow and Page (1968) dismiss the series as ‘long and tedious’ (ii.68) without, as Goldhill comments, considering ‘the basic question of why there are so many poems on this subject in this form’ (Goldhill [1994], 205 n.14). For an exploration of the relationship between image and prototype, art and text, in sixth century Byzantine epigrams, see Peers (2001), 95–103. The ekphrastic representation of divine images has important implications for the iconoclastic debate; unfortunately, Peers chooses to read the poems (from the Cycle of Agathias) as simple reflections of practices of worship and viewing, rather than works of literature which challenge and problematise the relationship between divine beings and both their visual and verbal representations.

14. E.g. The Courtship of Mars and Venus from the house of Marcus Lucretius Fronto, Pompeii. A number of mosaics from the Eastern provinces depict Venus Triumphans looking at herself in a mirror while resplendent on her conch-shell; see Balenseifen (1990), 244, and Catalogue nos. K50–52 (Tafeln 13–14). Arscott and Scott (2000), 11, testify to the ongoing association of Venus with her reflection, informing us of the Venus de Milo that ‘A much favoured “restoration” of the Melian goddess had her staring at her own reflection in the shiny glare of a polished shield, a variation on ancient narratives of Venus’s pleasure in her own image.’

15. E.g. a late Classical red-figure pelike in the Louvre (Balensiefen [1990], K95), which represents Aphrodite looking at herself in a hand-mirror while she is carried by winged Erotes, and a Hellenistic mirror, also in the Louvre (27663), with an incised Aphrodite and Eros. For the way in which mirrors were used and represented in Greek culture, see Frontisi-Ducroux and Vernant (1997), and for a Berger-inspired reading of the relationship between women and the images on fourth century BCE hand-mirrors (i.e. contemporary with the Knidian Aphrodite), see Stewart (1997), 71–81.

16. Indeed, another epigram ascribed to ‘Plato’ claims that the Knidia is so obviously a manifestation of the goddess (and, indeed, addresses the statue as if she were Aphrodite herself), that she transcends the realm of ‘art’ altogether, so that the viewer does not enter into a recreation of the Judgement of Paris, but actually sees the goddess as she then appeared:

(Greek Anthology 16.161)

17. The late antique epigrammatist Julianus (who demonstrates a keen sense of continuity with his Greek predecessors) takes this conceit to its logical conclusion in a poem on the Anadyomene, in which he warns the viewer:

(Greek Anthology 16.181.3f.)

18. As Simon Goldhill has commented with reference to the Myron’s Cow series, ‘ekphrastic epigrams represent not merely a work of art but also the poet as seeing subject’; they offer the reader the chance, like Aphrodite, to see oneself seeing (Goldhill [1994], 204f.).

19. Greek Anthology 16.181.2.

20. De Rerum Natura 1.22f.: nee sine te quicquam dias in luminis oras/exoritur neque fit laetum, neque amabile quicquam.

21. The primary reference is Athenaeus 13.590; ‘It was with [Phryne] as a model that Apelles painted his Anadyomene. And Praxiteles the sculptor, falling in love with her, made his Knidian Aphrodite with her as the model.’ See also the epigrams in the Greek Anthology which play with the story that Praxiteles’ sculpture of Eros was a gift to Phryne (16.203–206). For further Phryne references see Pollitt (1965), 86f., and Havelock (1995), 42–54.

22. Sharrock (1991), 37: ‘All artists in the Metamorphoses reflect to some extent on the one Artist—the poet himself’. For a discussion of references to Apelles in elegy, see ibid. 39f.

23. Wyke (1987). There is a large bibliography on the visual representation of ‘created’ women. See in particular G. Pollock, ‘Feministry’, in Parker and Pollock (1987), 238–43, and, in the same volume, Laura Mulvey’s study of the pornographic work of Allen Jones, ‘You don’t know what is happening, do you, Mr. Jones?’ (127–31), which sets out the way in which women ‘are being turned all the time into objects of display, to be looked at and gazed at and stared at by men. Yet, in a real sense, women are not there at all. The parade has nothing to do with woman, everything to do with man. The true exhibit is always the phallus. Women are simply the scenery on to which men project their narcissistic fantasies’ (30, my italics). The sexuality of Aphrodite in particular must be curtailed by her male creators because she is, in effect, the product of castration itself…

24. Although compare P. Fuller (1980), 79–129, who ‘argues that representations of the female body owe their sensual thrall not so much to the illusion as to the dissolution of the real’ (Arscott and Scott [2000], 13). The Aphrodite’s status as a series of ‘part objects’ manufactured and controlled by men, in both art and literature, does, perhaps, enhance her erotic appeal, but it does so by stifling the epiphanic autonomy of the goddess behind the image. Gutzwiller (2001), 87, comments that ‘these literary epigrams represent a viewer working through the powerful emotive impact of art so as to tame it in articulation of thought.’

25. Fowler (1991), 29.

26. See Fowler (1991), 31: ‘In literary ecphrasis the presence of the intermediary—usually fictional—visual artist introduces another potential focaliser.’

27. Havelock (1995), 62f.

28. As Lacan (1979), 102, claimed, ‘From the outset we see, in the dialectic of the eye and the gaze, that there is no coincidence, but, on the contrary, a lure. When in love, I solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that—you never look at me from the place from which I see you. Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see.’ I am greatly indebted here to J. Elsner, (forthcoming b): ‘The process of the gaze is thus one of desire, of the phanta-sised object (the object in the viewer’s mind) always eliding the real object (the one out there the viewer thought he was attempting to see), and of desire endlessly failing as the two objects (the imagined which is never commensurate with the real, which is never accessible), fail to coincide.’

29. Greek Anthology 16.159:

30. For the representation of the divine in Apollonius’ Argonautika, see Feeney (1991), 57–98, who comments: ‘Here we have, in an epic poem which has not yet embodied a god in action, the first representation of a god. And it is a representation in words of a representation in cloth of a representation on marble of a goddess—and her reflection’ (70). On the cloak of Hysipyle, see Frankel (1968), 100–03; Shapiro (1980); Zanker (1987), 68–70, 75f.

31. Cf. Argonautika 1.763–66:

32. For the original text see previous note.—It is no surprise, too, that Catullus’ extended ekphrasis in his 64th poem, also of a woven tableau, deliberately purports to transgress the boundaries of visual description by providing the sound which Apollonius pointedly withholds from Phrixus and the ram, and that this transgression takes the form of a speech, by Ariadne, about unrequited desire. See Laird (1993); also Janan (1994).

33. Indeed the erotic (and often specifically phallic) aspect of the gaze is a well-documented phenomenon in the ancient world. See Frontisi-Ducroux (1996).

34. Salomon (1997), 204. See also Havelock (1995), 16–37.

35. Osborne (1998), 83: ‘In as far as this is a private scene, Aphrodite is represented as a woman, but in as far as she acknowledges the spectator she is represented as a goddess. The merging of the artistic conventions thus presents a goddess, but one seen as a woman might be seen.’

36. Osborne (1998), 84.

37. Odilon Redon, Á Soi-Même: Journal (1867–1915), quoted by Jay (1993), 157.

38. Lucian Amores 13: . See also Osborne (1998) 230–35.

39. See in particular the representation of ‘Pantheia’ in the Imagines, an ekphrasis of a beautiful woman comparing her various features to the body-parts of famous works of art (she has the head of the Knidia, 6), and Jupiter Tragoedus, which explores the problems which occur when the gods are viewed in the form of their anthropomorphic images; Aphrodite is ranked as a marble goddess (appearing, of course, as the Knidia), but wishes to be upgraded to ‘golden’ status in accordance with her Homeric epithet—an interesting comment on the conflicting influences of image and text when the gods are conceived of according to their cultural representations.

40. Discussed by Frontisi-Ducroux and Vernant (1997), 196ff.