The Love Affair

For the past four summers, Archaeologist Iris C. Love has been searching the ancient Greek ruins of Cnidus in southwestern Turkey for one of the greatest prizes of antiquity: Praxiteles' long-lost statue of her namesake, Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. Earlier this year, Miss Love, 37, announced that she had unearthed the remains of the small circular temple that housed the famed nude. Last week the Long Island University professor unveiled an even greater surprise. She reported that she had found the head of the statue itself.

What made the "find" even more startlingand controversialwas that Miss Love did not have to dig for it at all. She discovered the head in London's British Museum among fragments brought back from Cnidus by the English archaeologist Sir Charles Newton more than a century ago. Why had it not been identified before? Experts who examined the head in the 19th century did think that it might be from a figure of Aphrodite, but not from Praxiteles' work, which was used as a model by so many ancient sculptors that 52 copies are still in existence. Yet the head was so battered that a firm identification seemed impossible, and it was eventually relegated to the museum's dark, dusty storerooms during a 1934 housecleaning.

Another Goddess. After examining the head herself last May, Miss Love decided that such neglect was completely unwarranted. It was carved of the fine-grained white Parian marble favored by Praxiteles, she explains, and the quality of workmanship, the late classical style and hairdo, the delicate folds in the neck, and the slightly larger-than-life dimensions all indicate that it came from the hand of the master.

Less than pleased by the suggestion that they had been ignoring a masterpiece in their very own building, British Museum officials hotly disputed Miss Love's identification. Modern experts, they noted, had concluded that the head was probably not of Aphrodite but of another figure in Greek mythology, Persephone, the goddess of spring. They also pointed out that the head was found by Sir Charles more than half a mile from the Temple of Aphrodite at the sanctuary of Persephone's mother, Demeter. That was not at all surprising, countered Miss Love; the Greeks were known to bury damaged statuary in sacred ground away from the original sites.

The museum's Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Denys Haynes, stood fast. "I am very, very cross with her," he snapped. "If she wants to put her points down on paper, we shall examine them, as we should the arguments of any member of the public." Angry as Haynes sounded, the museum was well aware of the interest aroused by the tempest. It dusted off the disputed sculpture, cleansed it with a mudpack of fuller's earth, and put it on public display once again.

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