But if the religious type had required that Phidias should make a nude goddess, we may be sure he would have made her naked and unashamed, with no more self-consciousness than a nude Apollo; above all, he would not have thought it necessary to provide a motive for her nudity.

With Praxiteles it is otherwise.

He represents the goddess as preparing for the bath, and just letting her last garment slip from her hand on to a vase that stands beside her; and, in addition to this provision of a motive--an excuse, one might almost say--for representing her without her clothes, he hints, from the instinctive gesture of her other hand which she holds before her body, at a half-conscious shrinking from exposure, a feeling of modesty which, however suitable to a woman, is by no means consistent with a high ideal of the goddess.

The face and figure are of extraordinary physical beauty of type, of a breadth and nobility which contrast with the smaller, prettier, and less dignified forms of later art; the gesture, too, has not the conscious coquetry which we see in such a work as the Venus de' Medici.

But, on the other hand, we must recognise that the statue represents the goddess under a human rather than a divine aspect, that even her mood and feeling of timidity are portrayed in a manner which, however charming in itself, is totally inconsistent with her worship as a great goddess.