L’Afrodite Cnidia nell’epigramma greco. Per una poetica del pastiche

In the Greek Anthology, a series of epigrams is devoted to the Aphrodite of Cnidus (APl 159-163; 165-170), the marble masterpiece that Praxiteles realised around 360 BCE, taking as his model, according to a rich anecdotical tradition, the courtesan Phryne, his lover. In this paper, I will concentrate on the peculiar exploitation of the visual memory of their audience on the part of some of the authors who deal with this subject: not only do they not provide any actual description of the work of art, following ancient ekphrastic conventions, but – as I hope to show – they evoke visual schemata that go beyond Praxiteles’s masterpiece. The paradoxical result is that while the epigrams are devoted to a specific work of art, the audience is invited to visualise different images of Aphrodite and to freely combine them to form their own personal mental portrait of the goddess. I propose a tentative explanation for such a phenomenon. As I observe, the ‘combinatory’ technique exploited by the epigrammatists finds a parallel in the tendency of Hellenistic art to combine different iconographic types or specific models in a single artwork; the opera nobilia of the past inspired reworkings and actual pastiches. In writing ekphrastic epigrams that freely combine different stories on Aphrodite, with their related iconographies, the poets most probably drew on the common experience of art experimented by themselves and their audiences and competed with sculptors and painters in suggesting their own reworkings of the celebrated masterpieces of the past. This can be read – I submit – as another instance of the traditional analogy and competition between poetry and art so crucial to ancient ekphrasis at least from the Hellenistic poetry onwards.