Piccadilly Circus At the south-western side of the Circus, moved from its original position in the centre, stands the Shaftesbury Monument memorial fountain, erected in 1892-1893 to commemorate the philanthropic works of Lord Shaftesbury. It is topped by Alfred Gilbert's winged nude statue, officially known as The Angel of Christian Charity. It is popularly known as Eros after the mythical Greek God of Love. The statue has become a London icon, and a graphical illustration of the statue is used as the symbol of the Evening Standard newspaper and appears on its masthead. The use of a nude figure on a public monument was controversial at the time of its construction, but it was generally well-received by the public. The Magazine of Art described it as, "...a striking contrast to the dull ugliness of the generality of our street sculpture, ... a work which, while beautifying one of our hitherto desolate open spaces, should do much towards the elevation of public taste in the direction of decorative sculpture, and serve freedom for the metropolis from any further additions of the old order of monumental monstrosities."' Technologically ground-breaking at the time, this statue was the first in the world to be cast in aluminium. The statue originally pointed its bow to the north, up Shaftesbury Avenue. However, during the Second World War the statue was removed for safe keeping, and when it was returned its bow was fixed pointing in to the south, towards Lower Regent Street. The winged figure on the fountain is generally called Eros, is often supposed to be The Angel of Christian Charity, but was intended to be Anteros, a brother of Eros, and is recorded as such in the records of Westminster City Council. The sculptor Alfred Gilbert had already sculpted a statue of Anteros, when commissioned for the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain, and chose to reproduce the same subject, who as 'The God of Selfless Love' was deemed to suitably represent the philanthropic 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. Gilbert described anteros as portraying 'reflective and mature love, as opposed to Eros or Cupid, the frivolous tyrant.' He The model for the sculpture was a 16-year-old Italian, whose name appears to have vanished from history. The fountain, when originally placed, was meant to have Anteros pointing his bow towards Wimborne Saint Giles in Dorset, which was the Earl's country seat. When the memorial was unveiled, there were numerous complaints. Some felt it was sited in a vulgar part of town (the theatre district) and others felt that it was too sensual as a memorial for a famously sober and respectable Earl. Some of the objections were tempered by renaming the statue as The Angel of Christian Charity, which was the nearest approximation that could be invented in the Christian pantheon for the role of Anteros in the Greek. But the name never became widely known, and the original name came back, under the shortened form Eros, signifying the God of Sensual Love; quite inappropriate to commemorate the Earl, but just right to signify the carnal neighbourhood of London, into which Soho had developed. The iconography deteriorated to the level where the memorial came to be seen as the lustful, half-naked Eros burying his shaft up Shaftesbury Avenue, absolutely typifying degenerate Soho. During his life-time Gilbert had already said of his sculpture 'There is more than