Head of Aphrodite (c. 100–200 CE): Art, History and Details

Head of Aphrodite (c. 100–200 CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

With idealized features including a straight nose, small mouth with thick lips, and a hairstyle best known from the so-called Capitoline Venus (now in Rome), this head likely belonged to a full-scale statue of the goddess of love. Like the Capitoline Venus and many other sculptures of the Roman period, it probably showed the goddess nude and bathing, harking back to the groundbreaking sculpture of Aphrodite at Knidos, carved by Praxiteles in the mid-fourth century BCE.

Object facts

• Title: Head of Aphrodite
• Date: c. 100–200 CE
• Culture: Italy, Roman
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: marble
• Dimensions: Overall: 30.3 cm (11 15/16 in.)
• Collection: GR - Roman
• Department: Greek and Roman Art
• Accession number: 1926.53

A detail from the museum

The elaborate hairstyle, arranged in a bow atop the head, identifies this figure as Aphrodite.

Collection credit

Gift of J. H. Wade

Further reading listed by the museum

• W. M. M., T. S., R. H., and F. A. W. "In Memoriam: Jeptha Homer Wade." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 13: 4 (1926): 63-91.
• Bieber, Margarete. "Greek Sculpture in the Cleveland Museum of Art," Art in America: An Illustrated Magazine Quarterly Magazine 31: 3 (July, 1943), pp. 112-126.
• Noelle, Alexander J., and Cleveland Museum of Art. Filippino Lippi and Rome. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2025.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.