Lesher, James, Debra Nails, and Frisbee Sheffield, eds. 2007. Plato's Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception. Hellenic Studies Series 22. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_LesherJ_NailsD_SheffieldF_eds.Symposium_Interpretation_Reception.2007.
14. Some Notable Afterimages of Plato’s Symposium [1]
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As the historian Anders Nygren showed, this vision of the soul inspired by love of divine beauty to ascend a celestial ladder pervades much of early Christian thought: “For a thousand years … the ladder-symbolism characteristic of Eros piety sets its mark almost without question upon the general conception of Christian fellowship with God” (Nygren 1953:594). One image of the ladder to heaven appears in an early fourteenth-century manuscript based on the writings of the sixth-century hermit Johannes Climacus or St. John of the Ladder (Figure 15):
The sun—a ladder gleaming in the sky,
Stretching beyond the reaches of my sight.
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Among early examples of the Heavenly Venus/Aphrodite cited by Clark are the Knidian Aphrodite of Praxiteles, from around 330 BCE (known to us only through later copies), and the famous Aphrodite of Melos—the Venus de Milo—from around 100 BCE (illustrated in Clark 1956). Art historian Erwin Panofsky (1969:109–138) has also linked the distinction between the two Aphrodites to the work of Titian traditionally called Sacred and Profane Love, arguing that the unclothed woman represents the “naked truth” or Heavenly Venus, while the clothed or “worldly” figure is her natural twin, though this reading has been challenged by others.
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Footnotes