In honour of International Women’s Day (IWD) the Acropolis Museum presents a new series of exhibitions titled ‘Temporary and unexpected visitors’ to the sounds of Lena Platonos poems performed by internationally acclaimed singer Maria Farantouri.
The collection includes artwork from other world museums to be hosted periodically, either in relation to a celebratory event, or unexpectedly. Putting its focus on female beauty, the museum revealed a rather unexpected iteration of the sculpture of Aphrodite, the Ancient Greek goddess of beauty from the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, ‘Venus in a gold bikini’.
The artwork will be displayed in the Museum’s ground floor from 8 March until 28 May, accompanied by a video and a free bilingual explanatory leaflet.
“The statuette was found alongside other ancient artwork in 1954 in the so called ‘House of Venus in bikini’ in Pompeii and kept in the ‘Secret Cabinet’ of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples ever since, due to its exquisite quality, the rarity of its decorative elements and its strong erotic aura,” the leaflet explains.
“The marble’s whiteness that glows towards the light (the verb used in ancient Greek to denote the glowing of light, is the same verb that produces the noun marble) and admirably becomes the golden decoration of her body, creating an impression of a snow white, soft skin, inviting and challenging you to touch it.”
The Acropolis Museum’s introduction of the statue continues with a passage that sparked some controversy.
“Under the goddesses’ nose’s chambers there lay the relatively small, diverted on the upper part lips, which have an erasmian austerity, creating a sensation that the goddess lays on a heavenly sphere, in contradiction to the one created by the “dressed” nudity and the rippling of her body’s white flesh, the well-shaped abdominal area and the young Priapus’s erection. As a whole it seems to hover between the heavenly and the pandemos (common to all the people) erotic sphere of the goddess and the golden decoration of her body alludes to the “golden Aphrodite” of the Homeric hymn: Iliad book 9, 389: not though she vied in beauty with golden Aphrodite…”.
The Acropolis Museum is also set to rearrange the exhibition in the Archaic Acropolis Gallery, for which an official announcement will be coming soon.