The lover is the perfect artist. Praxiteles and the Cnidian Aphrodite in Greek ekphrastic epigram.

In this paper I explore the possible connections between some of the poems on the Aphrodite of Cnidus in the Greek Anthology and the anecdotal tradition that flourished around Praxiteles and his creation. I show that in several epigrams the artist is constructed as a lover, and I argue that this has to do with the stories that circulated about Praxiteles and his mistress. If read in this light, these poems appear to exploit the theme of the lover as the perfect artist, most famously exemplified by the myth of Pygmalion. I then 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 description of the work of art, but they al so evoke visual schemata that go beyond Praxiteles’ masterpiece. The paradoxical result is that while the epigrams are devoted to a specific work of art, the audience is invited to visualize different images of Aphrodite and to freely combine them to form their own mental portrait of the goddess. Like Praxiteles, the poets — and their audiences — can thus be lover-artists and create masterpieces.