Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art had a magnificent new treasure from ancient Rome to show its visitors this week: a smooth-limbed, white marble statue of Aphrodite, shown startled at her bath by an intruder. The museum identified the statue, somewhat damaged over the years, as a 1st century B.C. copy of a masterpiece produced about 300 B.C. by a follower of the great Praxiteles. In the 1700s a German count had got it from
Italy and set it up in his Silesian castle, where it remained until the estate was broken up after World War II.
The museum gave no hint of the...