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- Greek horse and rider / circa 550 BC
- Corinthian alabastron / circa 600 BC
- Greek sphinx / circa 400 BC
- Flask with two faces / circa 250 BC
- Athena / circa 100 AD
- Venus / circa AD 150
- Intaglio / circa 100 BC-AD 100
Venus
Roman, from France of the Rhineland, circa AD 150
Bronze
Height: 12.5 cm
Venus was revered as the goddess of love and beauty throughout the
classical world. Here, in this cast bronze statuette, she stands
gazing into a mirror, recalling Freud's notion that women are
characterised by narcissism. The woman's cathexis of her whole body
and her desire for it to be beautiful, he believed, was an attempt to
compensate for the lack of a phallus. As he states in his essay `On
Narcissism':
Women, especially if they grow up with good looks, develop a certain
self-contentment which compensates them for the social restrictions
that are imposed upon them in their choice of object [of affection].
Strictly speaking, it is only themselves that such women love with an
intensity comparable to that of the man's love for them
(SE, 14, pp. 88-89).
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Venus was revered as the goddess of love and beauty throughout the
classical world. Here, in this cast bronze statuette, she stands
gazing into a mirror, recalling Freud's notion that women are
characterised by narcissism. The woman's cathexis of her whole body
and her desire for it to be beautiful, he believed, was an attempt to
compensate for the lack of a phallus. As he states in his essay `On
Narcissism':