The Hellenistic sculptor, however, not only in Greece but throughout the post-Alexandrian Empire, made no effort to restrain the tendency to insist upon the merely sensuous beauties of womanhood. In the well-known slab from the altar frieze of the Pergamene Acropolis, the girdle of the goddess Athena is placed just beneath the breasts. In the “Venus of Medici”—the typical embodiment of the womanhood of the Hellenistic age—drapery is laid aside altogether. In the sculptor’s view, he owes the world no explanation of the situation in which the goddess finds herself. He is content to offer those external charms of youthful beauty which fascinate the senses but do not satisfy the human heart. Accepting his standpoint, the “Venus of Medici” is one of the most perfect statues in the world. But the Aphrodite of Praxiteles and such a work as “The Three Fates” of Phidias, remind us that the grace of form in the Medicean Venus is, after all, rather humanly human than humanly divine. We feel that the suggestion of reserve to which the earlier sculptors clung only deepened the sensuous emotion which every sculptor seeks to arouse when he sets forth the physical charms of the Goddess of Love. [Illustration: THE VENUS OF MILO Louvre, Paris] From time to time during the Hellenistic age there was doubtless a return to the older ideals. The magnificent “Venus of Milo,” now in the collection at the Louvre, is a proof of this. Since its excavation in the island of Melos during the nineteenth century, the right of this magnificent marble to rank among the sculptural masterpieces of the world has never been challenged. The motive of the design has always furnished the critics with occasion for controversy. It may be that an exact restoration would give a further specimen of the type exhibited in the “Venus of Capua,” which depicts Aphrodite with the shield of Ares, the goddess using the shield as a mirror. The date of the production of the “Venus of Milo” is as problematical as the subject. At first it is difficult to believe that this statue is rightly assigned to so late a date as 150 B.C. There have always been, and doubtless the critical conflict will continue, differences of opinion as to the time of its production. Some have traced it back to the Aphrodite of Scopas. There is, however, little reason to doubt the opinion generally held, that it is really a work of Hellenistic times. Assuming this to be the case, the statue certainly exhibits a point of view which is in striking contrast to that offered by the “Venus of Medici.” The lofty sentiment of the “Venus of Milo” marks it as essentially un-Hellenistic. The sculptor throughout subordinates the physical beauties of the human form to the deeper sense of beauty which springs from the realization of the idea of the divinity of womanhood. For this reason, the statue stands in glorious solitude apart from the rest of the sculpture of its time.