Curated by Dr Ian Jenkins, renowned British Museum department of Greece and Rome senior curator, and presented by the British Museum in collaboration with Bendigo Art Gallery, The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece exhibition explores Greek ideas of representation of the human body and invites the visitor to consider how these artworks have shaped the way we think about and look at ourselves.  

Here are just a few highlights from the more than 120 objects featured in the exhibition:

Discobolus

Famous as an emblem of the ancient Greeks, Discobolus shows an athlete – naked, refined and eternally youthful – seemingly captured in the moment before releasing the discus.

In fact, limbs and torso are artificially arranged to correspond with Greek ideas of balance and rhythm in a composition.  

Made in the 2nd century AD, this marble statue is Roman and copies a lost bronze original made by the Greek sculptor Myron in the middle of the 5th century BC. Other marble copies survive where the original bronze has not, and these have been variously restored.  

Aphrodite

In Greek art, the female body was usually shown clothed.  However, fertility cults, sex scenes and the representation of Aphrodite provided opportunities for female nudity.

The theme of Aphrodite preparing for her bath was developed in the later Greek period to include a variety of poses.  A featured bronze is one of the largest and finest of all versions of a popular type of Aphrodite, where she leans over and lifts her left foot to remove her sandal.  The goddess, poised on one foot, seems to have been captured in a fleeting moment observed from life.

The Sphinx

The imaginative world of ancient Greek myth was peopled with a cast of weird monsters.  Many combined human with animal parts as symbols of their otherworldliness.

In Greek mythology, the sphinx combined the head of a woman, body of a lion and wings of an eagle. Sphinxes often featured on grave markers, as guardians of the tomb. The famous Thebian sphinx was said to wreak terrible vengeance on anyone who failed to solve the riddle she set them. Oedipus solved the puzzle “what animal walks on four legs, then two, then three?” The answer is man, who crawls as a baby, walks upright in his prime, and leans on a staff in his old age.

The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece closes at 5pm this Sunday. For details and tickets, visit www.bodybeautifulbendigo.com or call the box office on 5434 61