Sappho.

Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that began growing on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Of the paintings which survive from the Roman classical world, many are frescoes from the area of Campania around Naples. Campania includes Pompeii, Herculaneum, and other towns whose buildings, paintings, and sculptures were preserved by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79. Romans used painted decoration to visually open up and lighten their living spaces. They copied or imitated many of their paintings from Hellenistic Greek originals. This Roman fresco was found in Pompeii. It shows the young woman ‘Sappho’, who was an ancient Greek poet greatly admired in all ages for the beauty of her writing style.

Aphrodite, nude for the first time.

Aphrodite is a goddess of great meaning in Greek mythology. She is the goddess of love, beauty, sexuality and fertility. Back in 390-330 BC the ‘Aphrodite of Cnidus’ by Praxiteles claims its position in ancient Greek art as the first monumental cult statue of a goddess to be represented completely nude. The popularity was expressed through an endless stream of imitations and replicas. It can be seen as the starting point of a new history in art, as this introduction of the monumental female nude occurred at least three centuries after the introduction of the monumental male nude statue. It is a history that sexually defines the represented woman by her complete nudity and, on that account, keeps her in a perpetual state of vulnerability.