What are you looking at? A reflection on the Ashmolean’s Aphrodite exhibition 

The woman crouches, nude. A gauzy blue curtain hangs where she hides her chest; behind it I can just see the other artefacts. She isn’t looking at me. Over one white shoulder, she stares into the distance. This is Aphrodite, or perhaps the later Venus – not Mesopotamian Inanna, or Assyrian Ishtar. I know she couldn’t be the Cypriot Aphrodite either.

The plaque calls her Crouching Aphrodite; she’s the first of many images in this room that depict the goddess bathing. Some Romans sculpted her in the second century, but she is really only a copy; there was a Greek original. In many ways, the image of her is a succinct summary of the Ashmolean’s exhibition. The voyeuristic pose, the elaborate up-do, her naked back; these are the marks of beauty and desire. She implies sex, perhaps looks towards love. When I sit down later to write about her, however, I realise I didn’t truly notice much at all about her date, her body or her history. All I know is that she looked right past me.

The first room of the exhibition, Aphrodite: The Making of a Goddess at the Ashmolean, is painted a dark blue. Statues and friezes glow, though they were originally brightly-coloured, and the vases shine above their small lights. We have begun in media res, if you like to think of the goddess’ journey through time as one long story – which I, and presumably the curators, would. The next room takes us from the second century to around 3000 BC. We are now with Ishtar, Inanna, the goddess of love, as she began in the Middle East and, later, as she was in Cyprus; the goddess when she wasn’t a goddess of love at all. 

It makes sense to begin there, though, with the classical: we know her image the best. When I walk into the second room, I see that familiarity cast against the strange. Small fertility statues line the left wall. Etched into their features are some of the same rough lines I made in clay at school, using wooden pottery tools. A huge pink circle illuminates the space from the opposite end; everything is bright and quite literally rose-tinted. The sense of time is enormous, only matched by the weight of the goddess’ gaze; here, she looks right at me. 

Where the classical goddess looked away, her Middle Eastern ancestor was almost always facing straight ahead. Of course, there are logical explanations. Classical sculptors had very consistent ideas about which poses best displayed the body, and thus statues rarely looked straight ahead. Similarly, the function of these older statues fits a straight, forward-facing structure far better. Many were made for small shrines, for personal luck. 

But I do not believe that the sole purpose of an exhibition like this should be education. There is something valuable in how we respond to it, which parts stand out and why. I know it is probably a coincidence that the more powerful the goddess is in her culture, the more ancient and remote from my own imagination, the more direct her eyes are. It still feels a little like we have lost something there, and I cannot quite put my finger on it.

The final room reinforces my vague sense of loss. A replica of the Venus de Medici stands there, nude and shy as Crouching Aphrodite. On the opposite wall hang drawings that detail her precise measurements. They believed, in the Renaissance, that the Venus de Medici portrayed the perfect feminine form. The drawings thus measure out every limb, every joint. Little numbers and dotted lines scatter her body; drawn from the front, drawn from the side. I know that these were made, at least ostensibly, for artistic education. And yet, I can only imagine that these men were getting ready to cut the goddess open and sell her body for parts, like a pig or a side of beef. And, if she can be cut open like this, as though Venus de Medici lay on the table of the butcher’s shop and not on a pedestal in The Uffizi, then Aphrodite must no longer be a goddess. Now, she is only another woman. 

Hanging next door is A Girl Drawing by Peter der Werff, small and perhaps even unassuming. Of everything I have seen, though, I feel the closest to that little girl. She sits at a table, drawing the Venus de Medici. Between her and the statue, a boy holds the bust of another woman and tries to distract her. The girl’s gaze is unchanged and her mouth a little slack. I can’t see what’s on her page, but something tells me she isn’t trying to measure the goddess’ breast size. As always, Venus does not look back. Like the Crouching Aphrodite, the goddess looks over her shoulder and into the background. In this little painting, I feel maybe we have found something of what we lost from the statues of Inanna and Ishtar. Aphrodite might not be looking back at us just yet, but we at least are trying to catch her eye.