The Goddess of Love

Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art had a magnificent new treasure from ancient Rome to show its visitors this week: a smooth-limbed, white marble statue of Aphrodite, shown startled at her bath by an intruder. The museum identified the statue, somewhat damaged over the years, as a 1st century B.C. copy of a masterpiece produced about 300 B.C. by a follower of the great Praxiteles. In the 1700s a German count had got it from

Italy and set it up in his Silesian castle, where it remained until the estate was broken up after World War II.

The museum gave no hint of the price it had paid for its new Aphrodite, but called the statue the artistic equal of the Uffizi's Medici Venus--which was probably copied from the same Greek original. It was Praxiteles who created the first unclad Aphrodite, around the middle of the 4th century B.C. Praxiteles' original is lost to art, but many a sculptor afterwards tried to give his work the same fluid lines and graceful posture. Of those who tried, the unknown sculptor of the Metropolitan Aphrodite is one of the few who even came close.

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