12.5 " h Bonded Stone and Polyresin, Hand-finished, Marble Base

Louvre Museum, Paris
c. 200 B.C. Greek
This figurine represents the Aphrodite of Melos. In 1820, a peasant named Yorgos found the original broken body in an underground cavern on the Aegean island of Melos. Later she was taken out of Greece under unclear circumstances and brought to Paris where she was to be admired by the millions of visitors to that country's great museum, the Louvre. Her graceful body symbolizes an ideal of beauty that many long for but none attain. The French named her the Venus of Milo and she has since been popularly known under that name. Aphrodite was the Goddess of Love, identified in Rome with Venus. Although Homer describes Aphrodite as the daughter of Zeus and Dion, the more popular view was that she was conceived in the foam of the ocean from the seed of Uranus, dropped there when he was castrated, her name meaning "foam-born." Aphrodite was married to Hephaestus, but she loved Ares and she was known for her many love affairs, notably with Adonis and Anchises.

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