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Nudity of Aphrodite, Hathor, Bes, Bat
The nudity of Aphrodite is comparable to the frontality of depictions of Hathor, atypical for Egyptian Gods, the significance of which is likely the immediacy of Their manifestation, both being associated with beauty and pleasure.
Hathor shares Her frontality with Bes, who is closely linked to Her in the Returning Goddess rites. (The image of Bes on the left comes from the great temple of Hathor at Dendera.) Hathor inherits Her frontal iconography from Bat, who we see in a Predynastic depiction at right. The name Bat (bA.t) seems to have the sense of “the one who is manifest”, supporting the idea that frontality symbolizes immediacy. Similarly, Bes delights the Returning Goddess, bringing Her to presence among Her people in festivals of inebriation and other pleasures.
Beauty role
Returning to Greece, let us note Plato’s discussion of beauty at Phaedrus 250b-e. Beauty reaches further “down” into the world of process than any of the other ideal forms, and hence can act as a delivery device, so to speak, for the rest.
This works through the beauty of all the Gods, not only Aphrodite. Different Gods impart different virtues to Their followers, but all of Them do it through Their primordial beauty, to which different mortals are differentially sensitive.+++(4)+++
Each God is supremely beautiful, but beauty is especially associated with Aphrodite, and the entire process of responsiveness to ideality is discussed by Plato in the Phaedrus and the Symposium in the context of erotics.
Apollo vs Athena
Other Hellenic Gods are also frequently depicted nude, such as Apollōn. We may reflect on why Gods are nude or clothed in relation to this recognition of nudity as manifestness or immediacy of presence, and clothing as symbolizing mediation, such as through institutions.
Hence, I would relate Apollōn’s nudity to His association, e.g., with music, experienced with a high degree of immediacy, whereas Athena, for example, is virtually never nude, and is associated strongly with civic institutions and with dialectical reason rather than intuition.
Medusa
The frontality of Medusa’s image may be an echo, in Hellenic theology, of the Egyptian symbolic equation of frontality with manifestation or immediacy.
The power of petrification in Medusa’s gaze suggests the “blindness” that Socrates says at Phaedo 99d-e strikes those who try to grasp experience without conceptual mediation. Medusa’s image adorns temples to label them, in effect, as sites for the direct presence of the Gods.+++(4)+++
Synthetic profile
We might comment, as well, on the converse symbolic significance of the near ubiquity in Egypt of depicting Gods in a distinctive synthetic profile: something of the God is always not given. Hence, we cannot reduce the Gods to their functions or patterns of manifestation.