ABSTRACT
According to Pliny (Natural History 36.20), the fourth-century sculptor Praxiteles was praised most for his entirely nude statue of the goddess Aphrodite purchased by the island of Knidos.1 Yet, although total nudity already defined a woman’s fertile body in visual representations beginning in Paleolithic and Neolithic times,2 during roughly the first half of the first millennium BC – early in historical Greece – “The female nude,” as John Boardman has noted, “is not yet a proper subject for Greek art.”3
