Dillon Gisch (Stanford University)
Praxiteles' Knidian Aphrodite was one of the most famous statues in the ancient Roman world. It was so famous that, even more than 1500 years after its destruction, more than 500 images that replicate its distinctive vulva-covering gesture—the “modest Venus” replica series—have survived to the present day. Among these are 51 Roman provincial coin series struck in bronze from ca. 161 to 268 CE (Bernhart 1936; Jurukova 1973, 1981, 1987; Hristova & Žekov 2007). Following longstanding antiquarian practice, historians of Greek art have generally mobilized one specific series struck at Knidos during the marriage of Caracalla and Plautilla (ca. 202–205 CE) as documentary evidence of the Knidian type within the broader "modest Venus" replica series (Seaman 2004; Corso 2004–13; cf. Schnapp 1996; Barbanera 2011). However, the other 50 coin series have received little scholarly analysis following their initial catalog publications.
This paper uses quantitative and qualitative forms of visual analysis to analyze Roman provincial coin series featuring images of “modest Venus” for the first time. These coins were generally small bronze denominations, struck in finite quantities, and circulated within the immediate vicinity of the communities that minted them. This paper argues that, during the upheavals of the Roman Empire in the late second- and third-centuries CE, communities in Thrace and Anatolia leveraged images of “modest Venus” on local coinages to craft verbal and visual messages about their identities at multiple scales (cf. Harl 1987; Woolf 1994; Mattingly 2004, 2013; Howgego, Heuchert & Burnett 2005; Noreña 2011). In this way, this paper shows that coins featuring images of “modest Venus” simultaneously supported individual communities’ bids for special prerogatives granted by the Roman state, facilitated the construction of and competition within regional identity blocs, and functioned as mechanisms by which individual cities and towns maintained their own distinct local identities. This paper demonstrates that coins featuring images of "modest Venus" are more than documentary sources for reconstructing marble sculptures in metropolitan contexts; they are also capable of offering invaluable insights into the roles that famous landmarks, such as the Knidian Aphrodite, played in producing and maintaining multi-scalar identities in the Roman Empire.