Aphrodite

At Paphos on Cyprus, the goddess of love had no face. Her worshippers knelt before a plain cone of stone.

Long before Botticelli painted her rising from the sea, Aphrodite was an Eastern power. She grew out of Inanna and Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddesses of love and war, and out of Canaanite Astarte, carried west across the Mediterranean and remade at every shore. This was dangerous ancestry: the Ishtar of the Epic of Gilgamesh, who turned her cast-off lovers into a wolf and a frog, was no gentle patroness of romance. The Greeks recast the fertility deity as the embodiment of beauty, and Praxiteles' nude Aphrodite of Knidos set a template Western art would follow for more than two thousand years.

This book tracks her whole unlikely journey. The faceless stone becomes a marble nude; the Greek goddess becomes Roman Venus, divine ancestress of the Caesars. From there she is demonized by the early Church, revived in Botticelli's Renaissance, and reclaimed by modern feminists. Aphrodite endures, the book argues, because what she embodies never loses its hold: the pull of attraction and the power of beauty to create and to wound.

The most famous face in Western art began without one.