This is a gloriously rewarding show: both a breathtaking array of beautiful sculptures of the goddess of love and desire, and a deep scholarly probe into  the composition of myth. It is also compact, just three rooms to explore, each with their  own theme and purpose.

The blue gallery is our introduction and offers up something for everyone, all elegantly lit so the dream objects of classical beauty shine like the artistic treasures they are, all linked to known tales from Greek mythology. Then the visitor enters the tall,  pale gallery in the centre of  the exhibition (my  favourite). It’s  arguably a bit dry  and monochrome,  but stuffed full of archaeologically  sourced  objects that  tell a very  precise and  fascinating  story: the  gradual downgrading  of the Great Goddess  cult of the Bronze Age on  the island of Cyprus  (all-embracing, all-powerful  but crudely imagined in terms of imagery) from Mistress of the Universe to flirty courtesan, albeit now so beautifully imagined in shape and form.

I was able to talk with one of the curators, Anja Ulbrich, in this room and to hear how the Divine Feminine was so powerfully imagined in Cyprus that she needed no name and for thousands of years was known as just the Lady, the Queen or the Goddess. She was worshipped in over a hundred sanctuaries on the island, simple walled enclosures packed full of votive objects around her smoking altars.

Her cult objects were found to be black aniconic stones unshaped by man but whose shapes were distorted by gifts of jewellery, layer upon layer added by each generation. Below the cult object stood altars and trays laden with daily gifts of food and flowers. Her greatest sanctuary was at Paphos. Her island was rich from the copper mines and was one of the crucial staging posts where the Phoenician alphabet was copied by the Greeks.

It was not until the age of Alexander the Great that the Greek name Aphrodite was imposed upon the Goddess and she was encased in marble imagery. The last gallery is the crowd-pleasing show-stealer in terms of indelible images, with three fabulous reworkings of this ancient Goddess imagery: late-medieval, trash-modern and couture high-fashion. The Ashmolean has always embraced art and science, wonder and scholarship, and, as the gallery director, Xa Sturgis, explained to us, aspires “to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar”.

The Ashmolean is the oldest museum in England, and one of the most venerable public collections in the world (as opposed to the private galleries of princes). It is a thing to be proud of, and this exhibition plays to all its strengths, both as an art gallery and as an archaeological showcase.

I have always adored the bizarre origins of the Ashmolean, whose long journey started out with a wonder house of oddities put together by two generations of South London gardeners, while the rest of the nation
was consumed by the civil wars of the 17th century. Twenty cart-loads of their oddities were eventually shipped out of Lambeth to Oxford by the odious, social-climbing Elias Ashmole (a Freemason, astrologist and alchemist), who had purchased the lot over a drunken dinner.

‘Aphrodite: The Making of a Goddess’ is at the  Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, October 8, 2026 – April 11, 2027; ashmolean.org