A Roman Statue of Aphrodite on Loan to The Met
Statue of Aphrodite on view in The Met’s Greek and Roman galleries.
A celebrated statue of the goddess of love, Aphrodite, is now on display in The Met’s Greek and Roman galleries as a five-year loan until 2028. Discovered in the 1770s near Rome, the sculpture is first documented in April 1775 in a letter from Gavin Hamilton (1723–1798), the British painter and antiquities dealer living in Rome. Further correspondence between Hamilton and his clients indicates that by December 1775 the statue was acquired by Douglas Hamilton (1756–1799), 8th Duke of Hamilton and 5th Duke of Brandon, and transported to Scotland in 1776.
Left: Painting of Douglas Hamilton by Gavin Hamilton (1723–1798). Douglas Hamilton, 8th Duke of Hamilton and 5th Duke of Brandon, 1756–1799 (with Dr John Moore, 1730–1802, and Sir John Moore, 1761–1809, as a young boy), 1775–1777, National Galleries of Scotland, Purchased with the help of the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Art Fund 2001 (PG 3265). Artwork photographed by Antonia Reeve: www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/57649. Right: Hamilton Palace, Lanarkshire, Scotland, view from the northwest, photograph by Thomas Annan c. 1860 (public domain).
The statue, now also known as the Hamilton Aphrodite, was part of Douglas Hamilton’s distinguished collection of ancient art displayed at Hamilton Palace in Lanarkshire, Scotland, for nearly a century and a half. It remained there until the stately home was condemned for demolition and its contents dispersed in 1919 and 1920. The Aphrodite passed through various collections over the next century, including that of the American press and radio magnate, William Randolph Hearst, and the New York–based antiquities dealer, Joseph Brummer. With the sale of Brummer’s estate in 1949, however, the statue disappeared from public view for seventy-two years. Reemerging in 2021 in a Sotheby’s London sale of a private collection, the spectacular piece is now on loan to The Met. The Aphrodite was one of four important ancient sculptures that famously adorned the halls of Hamilton Palace. The whereabouts of one, a marble statue of Apollo, remains unknown.
Statue of Aphrodite, 1st-2nd century CE with 18th century restorations. Roman. Marble, H. 73 1/2 in. (187 cm). Xike Jiulu Collection (L.2023.5). Left: front view. Right: profile.
The Hamilton Aphrodite belongs to a sculptural type referred to by modern scholars as the Capitoline Aphrodite, after a version in the Capitoline Museums in Rome. The nude goddess stands with her weight on her left leg, her head turned to her left. She covers her breasts and pubic area with her hands. Her wavy hair, parted in the center, is tied in a topknot and the rest pulled back in a chignon at the nape of her neck. A garment draped over a loutrophoros (a vessel for water) at her side supports the statue. Some details of the Hamilton Aphrodite that did not survive from antiquity, including the support and small parts of the figure’s body and hair, were restored in marble in the eighteenth century. The support reproduces the counterpart in the Capitoline Museums. Additionally, the head is not original to the body, but comes from a different ancient statue of the same type.
Statue of Aphrodite, 1st-2nd century CE with 18th century restorations. Roman. Marble, H. 73 1/2 in. (187 cm). Xike Jiulu Collection (L.2023.5). Left: three-quarter view. Right: back view.
The over life-size statue of the goddess—caught unawares emerging from her bath—is based on the first large-scale, freestanding sculpture of a female deity in the nude: the Aphrodite of Knidos, carved by the Greek sculptor Praxiteles in the fourth century BCE. Displayed in a circular shrine on the island of Knidos, where she could be viewed from all sides, Praxiteles’s masterpiece was an immediate sensation. Upon seeing it, Aphrodite herself supposedly exclaimed, “Where did Praxiteles see me naked?” (Greek Anthology VI.160). The Roman author Pliny the Elder tells us that Praxiteles sculpted two statues of Aphrodite, one naked and one clothed. The island of Kos bought the draped figure because they thought the depiction of the goddess naked was obscene. The Knidians, however, bought the nude statue, which according to Pliny was not only the finest work by Praxiteles but in the whole world (Pliny NH 36.4.20-21). The Knidian statue inspired numerous variations by Roman artists centuries later, including the Hamilton Aphrodite created in the first or second century CE, as well as so many subsequent representations of the female nude, such as Botticelli’s evocative painting, The Birth of Venus.
