Sometimes it is the silence of centuries that bends the ear towards the eye. In the Walters Museum in Baltimore, at the top of the stairs, stands one of the saddest sculptures in history. True, the sadness is, like all of us, late and accidental, but it is also immortal. Or close.
I can see it from my window, in the evening, when the light is right, entrapped in glass, across the street, a marble back in gloaming shadow. The melancholy grows. I can hardly think, once I have glimpsed it, even accidentally, and must wander the streets to clear my mind.
Instead I ponder. Then I return, and climb the stairs again, to look at this cursed thing.
The statue is a first century A.D. Roman copy of a third or second century B.C. Hellenistic original. Strictly, it is not a statue at all, but a collage of sorts. At some time, probably in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, some colonialists took two broken statues of roughly the same size and conjoined them, placing the head of one goddess upon the shoulders and body of another.
And here is the tragedy. The piece is titled “Torso of Diana with Head of Aphrodite” (allowing the Greek and Roman names to rub together), but it is inaccurate. It is not only the torso, but also the breasts and genitals of the chaste Diana that have been set in eternal conjunction with the militantly lusty Aphrodite.
Looking at this statue, however, you see a shadow or mirror image; you imagine that somewhere is its corresponding creature, the body of Aphrodite and the head of Diana. Immediately, you must ask, which is worse. Which would be more powerful?
If Euripides can be trusted, Aphrodite will win the contest. The title character of his Hippolytus, is a young man entirely devoted to Artemis (the Greek Diana) and obsessively concerned with his chastity. Aphrodite destroys him, as she always destroys the chaste and naïve youth, leaving behind an experienced adult. This is the order of things.
But vestiges remain. I recently did a radio story on Baltimore’s red light district, known as The Block. One day, in the baroque Hustler Club, one of the dancers came and sat down beside me. I told her what I was doing. The petite blonde confessed that she had never danced nude before. She was nervous and not happy; she said she was doing it only for the money, and only for a month. She was wearing an elaborate concoction of yellow string around her right thigh. As the DJ called her name, I asked “What is that?”
“It’s to keep people from looking at my coochie,” she said and climbed up onto the stage and began to wipe down the pole with disinfectant.
She never touched the pole again. She danced around the stage, demur, shy, and uninspired. When she finished she came and sat down beside me again. The DJ called another woman’s name. By the second song, that dancer was lying on the floor in front of us with her legs spread and her toes pointed at the ceiling.
“Is that what you’re worried about?” I asked the first dancer.
She nodded. The woman slithered to the other side of the stage. “She’s a whore,” the dancer beside me said. “They’re all whores. If you do this more than a month, you’re a whore. I wouldn’t spread my legs like that. You’d at least have to buy me dinner first.” She knows the desire that makes her body profitable… and for that reason she despises it.
The Victorian critic John Ruskin lived so thoroughly in his head—learned so much of his anatomy from classical and Renaissance sculptures—that he was horrified to discover that his wife had pubic hair. He thought it unnatural, a horror he could never get over.
Still, in most cases, if the head remains virginal, the body will eventually overrule it; but in the Walters statue, the body remains forever undeveloped, adamantly untouched, while the head recoils in horror. Like Rilke’s Apollo, this tortured godhead cries for eternity “You must change your life.” But her own stone body remains cold.
