Cleveland Museum of Art

Head of Aphrodite

Date

100–200 CE

Medium

marble

Culture

Italy, Roman

Department

Greek and Roman Art

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

With idealized features including a straight nose, small mouth with thick lips, and a hairstyle best known from the so-called Capitoline Venus (now in Rome), this head likely belonged to a full-scale statue of the goddess of love. Like the Capitoline Venus and many other sculptures of the Roman period, it probably showed the goddess nude and bathing, harking back to the groundbreaking sculpture of Aphrodite at Knidos, carved by Praxiteles in the mid-fourth century BC. The elaborate hairstyle, arranged in a bow atop the head, identifies this figure as Aphrodite.

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