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Great art, like many other greatnesses, is often the artist's ability to exploit a long series of accidents which occurred before he was born.
Many parts of Greece are rich in a fine, translucent white marble. Marble was less expensive than bronze and it is easier to work with; neutral white has many advantages. It is not surprising that marble was frequently used for sculpture.
When the sculpting of female nudes became accepted, someone may have noticed that the translucent white marble was particularly suited to express the soft beauty of female flesh. When the painted accents were abandoned, or were simply lost, the fitness of the marble for declaring the softness of women probably became even more obvious.
Already in antiquity it would appear that visual artists saw the advantages of depicting Aphrodite's birth from the foam of the sea, or her arrival from it, even aside from the fact that the they're good stories in their own way. The foam and the soothing, female sounds of the water add yet more softness to the ideal of sensual contentment. Was the flood of Aphrodites from the sea, first in marble and later in paint, inevitable?
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Now we come to black and white photography. Many accidents forced the artist to see how soft a print became when focus and contrast were not perfect. And they often weren't. Was the monochrome of woman and the sea a perfection waiting to happen, predetermined by art history and merely waiting for a photographer who know both female beauty and her medium? Was Rosalind Maingot forced by the accidents of history into this wonderful photograph?
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