Love, desire and yearning sizzle through the hallways of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts this winter where the “Aphrodite and the Gods of Love” exhibition pays homage to the fiery and furious goddess of love. The display of 170 Greek and Roman works of art, including thirteen significant loans–nine from Italian museums–will take visitors on a five-thousand-year trek from the deity’s birth from the foamy waters of Cyprus.

Mention Aphrodite and the mind immediately wanders to the Venus de Milo standing in armless splendor at the Louvre or Botticelli’s lush Birth of Venus rising from the sea foam with all her voluptuous beauty cupped in a sea shell. Indeed, the goddess was always a favorite subject in ancient art. This exhibition, however, lifts the stereotype beyond love and beauty to show Aphrodite was more than an adulterous seductress and instigator of sexual desire for the ancients. “A list of her cult titles instructs us that she presided over civic harmony and naval battles, and was worshipped by brides and bridegrooms alike,” says Christine Kontoleon, the MFA’s senior curator of Greek and Roman Art.

The display is a quiet tribute to Boston-born classicist and collector Edward Perry Warren, who was an active buyer of antiquities from 1890-1920. Half of the objects in the show can be traced to him, either as gifts or works he purchased for the MFA. “Warren collected many pieces that touch on the power of Eros in Greek culture, and he did not shy away from overtly erotic scenes,” says Kontoleon. “When his pieces came to the Museum in the early twentieth century many were hidden from public view for fear they might offend. He believed that Greek philosophy and art would broaden the puritanical attitudes of stuffy Boston at the time.”

Some of the artifacts–for example, the five-foot tall sculpture of Aphrodite’s son, Priapos, with his sizeable, permanent erection–put viewers’ modesty to the crash test even today. Another highlight includes the statue of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite, representing the ideal human who is perfect in every way; it’s on loan from Palazzo alle Terme, Museu Nazionale Romano, and has only traveled outside Italy once before.

Visitors to “Aphrodite and the Gods of Love” will walk through a number of sculptural types, including influences of Praxitelis’ Aphrodite, the first nude depiction of a female form in antiquity. Initially considered controversial in the ancient world, the statue came to revolutionize depictions of the goddess. “It inspired countless variations in the Hellenistic period and defined the ideal female nude for generations of artists, even until the present day,” says Kontoleon. Featured in the exhibition are the Statue of Aphrodite or a Roman Lady (MFA), the terracotta Statuette of Aphrodite untying a sandal (MFA) and Aphrodite of Capua (Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli), a nearly seven-foot tall marble statue of the half-draped goddess with military associations.

Fans of Henry James will recognize Bartlett’s Head, so named for Francis Bartlett who provided funds for its acquisition. The work is mentioned in James’s “The American Scene” where he wonders over the separation of the beautiful, translucent marble head from her original surroundings. He concludes that she will have gained “unspeakably more” as a representative of Greek art in Boston. “He muses that Boston will become another shrine to the goddess. With this exhibition, it undoubtedly has,” says Kontoleon, who states that this is the
first-ever exhibition dedicated to the goddess worldwide, a “great coup” for Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts that gave its works a threeyear laser-cleaned “beauty treatment” especially for the occasion.

Kontoleon says that the exhibition gives Greeks a reason to look beyond their country’s current economic gloom and feel proud of the transcendental quality of ancient Greek art and its influence on the history of Western art. “Bringing the past more vividly to the present with such an exhibition reminds us all that we belong to a long historical continuum and that we all should derive strength and courage from looking behind to realize our future.”

Aphrodite and the Gods of Love
October 26, 2011-February 20 • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, tel.: 617 267 9300
Saturday-Tuesday 10 a.m.-4:45 p.m., Wednesday-Friday 10 a.m.-9:45 p.m.; admission $20 (adults), senior discount applies; free for MFA members and visitors under 18 years of age.