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Phryne

Phryne was an ancient Greek hetaira (courtesan). Born Mnesarete, she was from Thespiae in Boeotia, but seems to have lived most of her life in Athens. She apparently grew up poor, but became one of the richest women in Greece.

Life
Very little is known about Phryne's life for certain. Ancient sources about her largely tell disjointed anecdotes which are difficult to piece together into a full biography, and many of those stories may be invented. Helen Morales writes that separating fact from fiction in accounts of Phryne's life is impossible. Phryne was from Thespiae in Boeotia. She was probably born in the 370s BC, and was the daughter of Epicles. Both Plutarch and Athenaeus say that her real name was Mnesarete. According to Plutarch, she was called Phryne because she had a pale complexion like a toad ( in Greek). Kapparis suggests that in fact he was disenfranchised, possibly because he failed to gain one fifth of the jurors' votes and was unable to pay the subsequent fine. The trial of Phryne also supposedly led to two new laws being passed governing courtroom behaviour: one forbade the accused being present while the jury considered their verdict; the other forbade lament in the courtroom. Model In ancient literature, hetairai were often said to have modelled for famous artists: for instance Aristides of Thebes was said to have painted Leontion. Phryne was particularly associated with the sculptor Praxiteles, and was reputedly the model for both him and the painter Apelles. Phryne is most famously associated with Praxiteles' Aphrodite of Knidos. Produced in the mid-fourth century, this was the first three-dimensional and monumentally sized female nude in ancient Greek art. However, the historicity of this association is doubtful. The only source for the connection is Athenaeus. The sixth-century rhetorician Choricius of Gaza also says that Praxiteles used her as a model for a statue of Aphrodite, though according to him it was one commissioned by the Spartans. It is not mentioned by other ancient authors who discuss both Phryne and the Aphrodite of Knidos, such as the first-century AD Roman author Pliny the Elder; nor is the association mentioned in Pseudo-Lucian's extensive description of the Aphrodite of Knidos, or the eleven surviving ancient epigrams about the sculpture. In the second century, the theologian and philosopher Clement of Alexandria named the model not as Phryne but Cratina. Praxiteles also produced a golden or gilt statue of Phryne which was displayed – according to Pausanias dedicated by Phryne; according to Athenaeus by the Thespians – in the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi. This may have been the first female portrait ever dedicated at Delphi; it is the only known statue of a woman alone to be dedicated before the Roman period. One of Praxiteles' sculptures of Eros, the god of sexual desire, was said to have been inspired by his desire for Phryne, and he later gifted it to her. In the version of the story told by Pausanias, Phryne tricked Praxiteles by pretending that his studio was on fire; when he mourned the loss of the statue of Eros she knew that he believed it to be his most beautiful work and thus requested that he gift it to her. Phryne later had the statue installed in Thespiae alongside two other sculptures by Praxiteles, one of Aphrodite and one of Phryne herself. According to Pliny, Phryne was also the model for Praxiteles' sculpture of a smiling courtesan, which may have originally been displayed in Athens. Like Praxiteles, Apelles used Phryne as a model for Aphrodite. According to Athenaeus, he was inspired by the sight of Phryne walking naked into the sea at Eleusis to use her as a model for his painting of Aphrodite Anadyomene (Aphrodite rising from the sea). This was displayed at the sanctuary of Asclepius on the Greek island of Kos before being taken to Rome by the emperor Augustus (); by the first century AD it appears to have been one of Apelles' best-known works. ==Reception==
Reception
Hypereides's defence speech was translated into Latin by the orator Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, active in the late 1st century BC. The translation was praised in an oratorical handbook written by Quintilian in the 1st century AD for conveying what Quintilian calls the of the original. Albert Schachter suggests that the original Greek text may have been kept in Phryne's native Thespiae, and that Corvinus possibly travelled there to consult it. Phryne was largely ignored during the Renaissance in favour of women such as Lucretia and Cleopatra, who were seen as heroic. Only three paintings of Phryne are known from the seventeenth century, but interest in depicting her increased in the eighteenth century with the advent of Neoclassicism. Early depictions of her by Angelica Kauffmann and J. M. W. Turner avoid eroticising her. From the eighteenth century French artists focused on portraying Phryne as a courtesan, particularly depicting her public nudity at religious festivals or during her trial. This came as part of a broader interest in historical courtesans in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art and literature. By the mid-nineteenth century artists such as Gustave Boulanger, rejecting the neoclassical aesthetic of Hellenism, painted Phryne without any reference to the ancient context as an eroticised and Orientalised nude. The most famous nineteenth-century depiction of Phryne was Jean-Léon Gérôme's Phryne Before the Areopagus. Gérôme's painting depicts Phryne standing naked in the courtroom, covering her face with both arms and leaving her body exposed. This painting was controversial for showing Phryne covering her face in shame, in the same pose that Gérôme used in several paintings of slaves in Eastern slave-markets. Critics argued that Phryne should be proud rather than ashamed of her beauty, and that Gérôme's portrayal of Phryne was anachronistic. Others complained that Gérôme's Phryne was too like an ordinary woman, lacking in the ideal Aphrodite-like beauty they expected, or that the apparently prurient reactions of the judges was inappropriate, and that they should have been portrayed as having religious admiration, rather than desire, for Phryne's beauty. Driven by this controversy, Gérôme's painting was widely reproduced and caricatured, with engravings by Léopold Flameng, a sculpture by Alexandre Falguière, and a drawing by Paul Cézanne all modelled after Gérôme's Phryne. The painting was widely enough known that in 1884, Bernhard Gillam could parody it in a political cartoon for the American magazine Puck. By the end of the century, Gérôme's painting of Phryne and the various works inspired by it had made her an "international cultural icon", in the words of Laura McClure. , Phryne at the Poseidonia in Eleusis, 1889 The story of Phryne bathing at Eleusis, which according to Athenaeus inspired Apelles to paint the Aphrodite Anadyomene, was also a subject for nineteenth-century painters. In Britain, Frederic Leighton and Edward Burne-Jones both painted works on this theme in the 1880s, but the most famous nineteenth-century painting of the subject was Henryk Siemiradzki's enormous – nearly eight metres wide – painting Phryne at the Poseidonia in Eleusis. In literature, the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope took Phryne's name for two women: George I's mistress the Duchess of Kendal in his poem "Phryne", and Robert Walpole's mistress (and later wife) Maria Skerret in the Epistle to Bathurst. Phryne appears in Charles Baudelaire's poem "Lesbos", from , where she is used metonymically to represent courtesans in general. In the early twentieth century, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke alluded to Baudelaire's "Lesbos" in his poem "", echoing the reference to Phryne. Rilke compares the flamingos to Phryne, as they seduce themselves – by folding their wings over their own heads – more effectively than even she could ("they seem to think / themselves seductive; that their charms surpass / a Phryne's"). Late nineteenth-century depictions of Phryne in other media included a waltz by Antonin d'Argenton, a shadow-theatre production by Maurice Donnay – where the scene of Phryne's trial was modelled on Gérôme's painting – and a comic opera by Camille Saint-Saëns. In the twentieth century, Phryne made the transition to cinema. In 1952 Alessandro Blasetti's "" ("The Trial of Phryne") adapted the story of Phryne's trial with a contemporary setting, based on a short story by Edoardo Scarfoglio. The following year, the peplum film ("Phryne, the Oriental Courtesan") was released. In both films, the depiction of the trial is iconographically influenced by Gérôme's painting – in , her lawyer covers her with his own cloak before removing it in the manner of Gérôme's Hypereides; in Phryne undresses entirely, though to avoid censorship only her naked back is shown on screen. A third Italian film, ("The Venus of Chaeronea"), focused on the story of the relationship between Phryne and Praxiteles. File:200404-phryne-tempting-xenocrates.jpg|Salvator Rosa, Phryne and Xenocrates 1662 File:Phryne Before the Areopagus MET DT2926.jpg|Jean-Baptiste-Henri Deshays, Phryne Before the Areopagus mid-18th century File:Phryne seduces the philosopher Xenocrates, Angelica Kauffmann 1794.jpg|Angelica Kauffman, Phryne Seduces the Philosopher Xenocrates 1794 File:Jacques-Louis David - Phryné before the Judges - 2013.249 - Cleveland Museum of Art.tif|Jacques-Louis David, Phryne Before the Judges 1818 File:Turner Phryne at Eleusis.jpg|J.M.W. Turner, Phryne Going to the Public Baths as Venus: Demosthenes Taunted by Aeschines 1838 File:-Standing Female Nude- MET DP263575.jpg|Marie-Christine Leroux as Phryne, photographed by Nadar for Gérôme's Phryne Before the Areopagus 1860–61 File:Jean-Léon Gérôme - A Roman Slave Market - Walters 37885.jpg|Jean-Léon Gérôme, A Roman Slave Market 1884. One of Gérôme's slave-market paintings showing the slave in the same pose as Phryne. File:Bernard Gilliam - Phryne before the Chicago Tribunal.jpg|Bernhard Gillam, Phryne Before the Chicago Tribunal, 1884. Gillam's parody of Gérôme's painting depicts the presidential candidate James G. Blaine as Phryne and Whitelaw Reid, the editor of the New York Tribune, as the orator Hypereides exposing his scandals. File:Phryné - opéra-comique en 2 actes ..., musique de C. Saint-Saëns. - affiche - F. Marcotte - btv1b53187307n.jpg|Poster for the comic opera Phryné 1893, with music by Camille Saint-Saëns ==Notes==
Works cited
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