A Bronze Figure of Aphrodite, Roman Imperial, circa 2nd Century A.D.

the goddess standing with her weight on the right leg and both hands extended, and wearing a bracelet and armbands, her head turned to her left, her wavy hair parted in the center, falling in long corkscrew curls over the shoulders, and surmounted by a towering stephane incised with a moon crescent and crowned with five openwork palmettes.

American private collection, acquired in Tel Aviv in 1987
Fortuna Fine Arts, New York, 1999
European private collection

Fortuna Fine Arts, Ltd., New York, Beloved by Time: Four Millennia of Ancient Art, 1999, no. 138, illus.

The distinctive style of the present figure indicates that it originated in the Eastern Mediterranean, probably in the Roman provinces of Syria (see L. de Clercq, Collection de Clercq, Paris, 1888-1911, vol. 3, pls. 12-13, 23, 34, etc.) or Egypt (see Roeder, Bronzefiguren, pl. 37);  for a closely related example see Sotheby's, London, December 8th-9th, 1986, no. 265. The arms of such relatively large figures were cast separately and, depending on the angles at which they were mounted and the attributes they carried, could make the same basic figure adopt different poses and thus conform to different types of Aphrodites, each with a different religious and mythological emphasis (holding a mirror to her face, exhibiting the Apple of Discord, brandishing her girdle, etc.).

Statuettes such as the present one were created for private devotional use and placed in domestic lararia, or house-shrines; "Based on ... documents [from Roman Egypt], such as marriage and mortgage contracts, these effigies of the goddess acompanied the bride in her daily life so as to guarantee her happiness and prosperity. Throughout the Mediterranean in the Roman period, brides and mothers made offerings to similar statuettes for the blessings of Aphrodite, such as... fertility and harmony [in] their married lives" (Chr. Kondoleon, Antioch, the Lost Ancient City, Worcester, Mass., 2000, p. 202).