Getty Villa: Venus

No respectible collection of antiquities would be complete without a statue of Venus.  Actually, Aphrodite (Greek) and Venus (Romans) were the goddess of love. 

This piece is from 175-200 A.D.  It is modeled after the first full nude statue of Aphrodite by the Greek Sculptor Praxiteles around 350 B.C.   

This full scale female nude was placed in a specially contructed temple that allowed it to be viewed from all sides.  Pliny the Elder wrote, in his Natural History, that the statue had a powerful effect on viewers.  There is a story that a man was overcome with love for the statue and hid inside the temple at night to embrace it. 

Yeh...that will get you arrested.