The Re-Birth of Venus

Abstract This paper examines the place of the Aphrodite Kallipygos statue in European aesthetics in the early modern period (ca. 1300–1800) and traces the impact it may have had on dress in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The study contextualizes the sculpture within the discipline of art history and the field of dress studies. It focuses on the unfitted tunic dress cinched below the bust, and on how some chemise dresses came to be worn in a new way in the 1790s. At this time new embodiment practices emerged in French fashion. A new columnar silhouette was on the rise that paid homage to the “natural body” seen in statuary, and cinching below the bust enhanced the delineation of individual breasts. Subsequently we witness the progressive lessening or elimination of voluminous underpinnings, allowing the controversial delineation of the lower body through clothes to take place, and the rise of a new erogenous zone, the buttocks, which were hallmarks of the Aphrodite Kallipygos. Through this article, the authors aim to demonstrate with visual and written sources that this statue was sufficiently known, admired, and copied to have had an effect on late-eighteenth-century dress behaviors.