After reading the text set forth your own opinion of it.

Praxiteles' most famous statue was the Aphrodite of Knidos. This statue presented a fullscale female nude for the first time. Literary sources are lavish in their praise of the figure's beauty, and Pliny thought it thebest statue in the world. He even suggested that Aphrodite herself must have helped in its creation, though others thought the statue representedPhryne, Praxiteles' mistress, it was copied again and again in Romantimes, and many variations of the type developed. The statue also appeared on the coinage of Knidos. Why did it exercise the power it did? Was it just its surprising, and perhaps shocking, nudity? Aphrodite stands naked, caught in a fleeting pose, her left hand resting on the drapery thrown over the adjacent water jar, her right brought across in front in an intuitive defensive gesture. Like Hermes, she has long legs and a small head. Her right hip pushes out, and the S-curve rises slowly through her body. She has soft, wavy hair, and her face has a triangular forehead, shadowy eyes, a straight nose, and a small mouth. The marble original was made around 350 bce and stood in an open shrine visible from every side. Thus, the divine had become accessible, almost personal, captured in an intimate moment.

Read the text for detail. Discuss the following text in the dialogue in class.

We learn of Skopas from literary sources and are told that he was the architect of the Temple of Athena Alea at Tegea in the Peloponnese. This building is important in its own right as an innovative example of a Doric temple of the middle years of the 4th century bce.
A number of fragments of its sculptural decoration in the pediments survive. The somewhat damaged heads from these pedimental figures,known as the Tegea heads, reveal a new stylistic current in the 4th century bce. This was the fashion for depicting stressed emotional states by treating facial features in a pronounced way: the inner corner of the eye is deep-set, there is a bulge of the eyebrow over the outer corner of the eye, the forehead is in two planes, the lower of which projectsmarkedly, the cheeks are flat, and the hair is tousled. The power andtension in these heads are undisguised. Skopas, sources say, definitely made the freestanding marble figures that stood beside the cult statue, but we do not know for sure that he made these pedimenlal ones as well. This sculptural style is new and vigorous, and it is distinguishable at other sites where Skopas worked, such as the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos. Some heads there display similar traits to those of the Tegea heads. Skopas also worked on the new Temple of Artemis at Ephesos. So it is clear that this new and different style is widespread and popular and, on the available evidence, it seems logical to ascribe it to Skopas.

The characteristic traits of the style—the squarish skull, the squarish forehead in two planes, the deep-set eyes, bulging brows, open mouth, and the expression of intensity and strain—are found in the statue of the celebrated hunter Meleager, of which some twenty copies are known. The type is identified by the presence of a boar's head next to the figure in several copies: Meleager was one of the leaders in the hunt for theKalydonian boar. The number of copies argues its popularity among Roman patrons, for whom subject matter and intended placement of asculpture were major criteria. No literary source mentions a Meleager by Skopas, but the number of copies also suggests a famous Greek original (as with the many copies of the Doryphoros of Polykleitos and its knownGreek reputation), and the style of the head is consistent with that of theTegea heads. The torso of Meleager shows strong modeling, with soft transitions from plane to plane and more abrupt, dearcut musculature, the line of hip clearly demarcated. A slow torsion pulls the left shoulder forward to balance the rightward thrust of the hip and to emphasize the importance of the intermediate view. The ‘full‑frontal’ view of Classical sculpture, still shown in the broad expanse of torso, is now on the wane. It is the intermediate, three-quarter view, shown by the direction of the head's gaze, that co-ordinates movement and brings out the full power of the head.