Callipige Aphrodite

One of the treasures of the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. This is thought to be a 1st century BCE copy of a Greek original made around 300 BCE. "Callipige" means, more or less, "with a beautiful ass." The head is a Renaissance replacement for the lost original.

The name recalls the well attested cult of Aphrodite Kallipygos at Syracuse in Sicily, about which Athenaeus told this story:

The people of those days were so attached to their sensual pleasures that they even went so far as to dedicate a temple to Aphrodite of the Beautiful Buttocks, for the following reason. Once upon a time a farmer had two beautiful daughters. One day these girls, getting into a dispute as to which one had a more beautiful backside, went out onto the public street. And by chance a young man was passing by, the son of a rich old man. They showed themselves to him, and when he saw them he voted in favor of the older girl. And in fact, falling in love with her, when he got back to town, he took to his bed and told his younger brother everything that had happened. And the younger brother also went to the country and saw the girls, and he fell in love with the other daughter. And so when the boys' father tried to get them to marry someone of the upper classes, he couldn't persuade his sons, and so he brought the girls in from the country, with their father's permission, and married them to his sons. And so these girls were called fair-buttocked by the citizens, as Cercidas of Megalopolis says in his Iambic Verses: "There was a pair of beautiful-buttocked girls in Syracuse." And so these girls, when they got wealthy and famous, founded a temple of Aphrodite and called the goddess the Fair-buttocked, as Archelaus of Chersonesus tells us in his Iambic Verses.

The Baroque sculptor Francois Barais made a more decorous version of this statue in the 1680s, now in the Louvre: