Why Does Aphrodite Have Her Foot on That Turtle?

Abstract

Why Does Aphrodite Have Her Foot on That Turtle? CAROL L. DOUGHERTY τὸ δὲ πρὸ ποδὸς ἄρειον ἀεὶ σκοπεῖν / χρῆμα πᾶν. It is always better to look at what lies before one’s foot, in every case. —Pindar, Isthmian 8.12. For thousands of years a certain statue of Aphrodite has puzzled its viewers—the goddess stands with one foot delicately balanced atop a turtle.1 By all accounts a spectacular work of gold and ivory fashioned by the famous classical Greek sculptor Phidias in the 420s bce (see fig. 1), the original no longer exists. However, 700 years later, we have the following account of it by the second-century ce geographer Pausanias: “Behind the portico built from the spoils of Corcyra is a temple of Aphrodite. . . . The goddess in the temple they call Heavenly (Ourania); she is of ivory and gold, the work of Phidias, and she stands with one foot upon a turtle.2 Pausanias then throws up his hands at the significance of the turtle under Aphrodite’s foot: “the meaning of the turtle . . . I leave to those who care to guess.” His contemporary, Plutarch, however, has no such qualms. In an advice book for brides and grooms, he explains that, “Phidias represented the Aphrodite of the Eleans stepping on a turtle as a symbol for women of staying home and keeping silent.”3 While Plutarch explains the significance of the turtle, his interpretation fails to account for why Aphrodite (and not Hera or Hestia, goddesses more often associated with a woman’s place in the home) has her foot on this iconic turtle. arion 27.3 winter 2020 26 why does aphrodite have her foot on that turtle? Fig. 1: Aphrodite with a tortoise, III century ce marble, Temple of Artemis Syria, Louvre. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Carol L. Dougherty 27 What’s her connection to this lowly creature, or, even more puzzling, to women as domestic creatures?4 Conspicuously absent from Plutarch’s account of the statue is any attention to the sensual beauty of Phidias’s Aphrodite or consideration of how the domestic symbolism of the turtle relates to her own famed sexuality. Although Phidias’s gold and ivory statue no longer survives, it appears to have inspired a series of copies that exemplify the lovely, seductive, and radiant beauty for which the goddess was typically celebrated in poetry and song.5 In fact, Kenneth Lapatin describes the Brazza Aphrodite—one of the surviving statues that imitated the Phidian original—as “a sensuous work: the left foot resting atop the tortoise creates a rhythm that surges up the body, along the dominating mass of the himation toward the suggestively distended right hip and through the animated, yet revealing drapery of the chiton across the abdomen and breasts.”6 And peeping out from under her diaphanous drapery is the head of a turtle upon which Aphrodite lightly rests her foot, leading me to rephrase the question—why does this seductive Aphrodite, goddess of sexuality and desire, have her foot on that domestic turtle? Fast forward another 900 years, and we find that in the seventeenth century ce, European emblematists are, in fact, asking just this question. As we will see below, Phidias’s statue (as well as the turtle alone) has an extended afterlife in early modern emblem books. An art form uniting word and image, the emblem combined a brief but challenging motto with a pictorial device (an impresa) drawn from a classical or Egyptian prototype, both of which were followed by an epigram , again of classical origin. Phidias’s statue of Aphrodite Ourania appears to have been of particular interest to these artists.7 Fascinated not just with Phidias’s rendering of Aphrodite and the turtle but also with Plutarch’s interpretation of it, early modern emblematists and even painters bring statue and text together to explore the relationship between Aphrodite and the turtle. They take a mischievous delight in expos- 28 why does aphrodite have her foot on that turtle? ing (rather than erasing) the obvious contradictions between the sexy Aphrodite that Phidias carved into gold and ivory and Plutarch’s stay-at-home turtle, suggesting that a similar tension might be in play in the ancient world...