The “pastoral” is a genre of poetry that originated in Hellenistic Greece (the Idylls of Theocritus) and was later indelibly reshaped by Virgil, the Classical Roman poet, in his Eclogues. Typically a pastoral poem treats of shepherds singing of themselves, their loves and their music in an idealized but tempered rural landscape (“Arcady”) inhabited by the lesser gods, Pan and his attendants and the nymphs. Aphrodite, by contrast, is the goddess of uncompromised love, searing beauty and boundless fertility and, like Apollo, an Olympian deity. Through the corruption of our vision – through our materialism and brute secularism – she has been expelled from her home on Mount Olympus and been forced to take refuge, by means of camouflage, in “Arcady” where death and loss as well as a bittersweet loveliness prevail. Here, Aphrodite wears her 20th Century camouflage as the fallen Eve does fig leaves or animal skins, seemingly made ashamed of her nakedness’s original both power and beauty. That her jacket is patterned with U.S. army desert camouflage links the goddess, however, not only to the outsized force of military weaponry but also to the desert as Nature at its most sublime – to Nature at its most fearfully untamed and most ravishingly beautiful. Aphrodite’s camouflage thus conveys, on several levels, a moral ambiguity about the role of absolute untrammeled power. As deployed by Finlay, camouflage is a highly complex conceit. Removed both in time and place from the Ideality of a Golden Age or of an Olympus or an Eden, we, like the modern Aphrodite, must resort to camouflage – necessarily imperfect, or “mottled” (metaphorical), language – in which to clothe our most formidable thoughts, our purest ideas. Flawless clarity or transparency of expression, or direct speech with a god, is only a myth. Yet, camouflage, to the extent it conceals or misrepresents also hints at and reveals: Finlay’s camouflage is the garb properly only of the Classical gods, of their original perfect puissance. It is a variety of poetry (art), and the Aphrodite who has donned it becomes a warrior (artist-warrior) – not for any mundane end but for the Ideal.