The Naked Standing Goddess: A Group of Archaic Terracotta Figurines from Paestum

Abstract

The article presents a distinctive group of terracotta figurines from Paestum portraying a naked standing goddess. Excavations at the extramural sanctuary in the locality known today as Santa Venera have led to the recovery of 21 such figurines, which date to the first half of the sixth century B. C. While the technology used in producing the moldmade figurines can be traced to workshops at Metaponto, the image of the naked goddess itself is almost never represented among the vast corpora of terracottas found at other Greek sites in the West. The source of the imagery is traced to the eastern Mediterranean, where a naked standing goddess is more commonly observed. In the Aegean, the iconography in question can be associated with Phoenician Astarte or Cypriot Aphrodite. In places where the Greeks and Phoenicians came in contact with one another, there is often an overlapping in the persona of the two deities; in addition, a similar conflation sometimes occurs between these two deities and Hera. For the sanctuary at Santa Venera, the argument is thus made, based on the presence of figurines of the naked goddess, that the original patron deity of the cult was related to Phoenician Astarte or Cypriot Aphrodite. Later in the sanctuary's life, during the Roman period, inscriptions indicate that the cult patron was Venus.