Venus de Milo

Venus de Milo
The Venus de Milo or Aphrodite of Melos is an ancient Greek sculpture that was created during the Hellenistic period. It is one of the most famous works of ancient Greek sculpture, having been prominently displayed at the Louvre Museum since shortly after the statue was rediscovered on the island of Milos, Greece, in 1820.
The Venus de Milo is believed to depict Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, whose Roman counterpart was Venus. Made of Parian marble, the statue is larger than life size, standing over high. The statue is missing both arms, with part of one arm, as well as the original plinth, being lost after the statue's rediscovery.
Description
The Venus de Milo is an over tall Parian marble statue of a Greek goddess, most likely Aphrodite, depicted with a bare torso and drapery over the lower half of her body. The figure's head is turned to the left. The statue is missing both arms, the left foot, and the earlobes. There is a filled hole below her right breast that originally contained a metal tenon that would have supported the right arm. The Venus' flesh is polished smooth, but chisel marks are still visible on other surfaces.
Stylistically, the sculpture combines elements of classical and Hellenistic art. Features such as the small, regular eyes and mouth, and the strong brow and nose, are classical in style, while the shape of the torso and the deeply carved drapery are Hellenistic.
Discovery and history
Discovery
The Venus de Milo was discovered on 8 April 1820 by a Greek farmer on the island of Milos. Olivier Voutier, a French sailor interested in archaeology, witnessed the discovery and encouraged the farmer to continue digging. Voutier and the farmer uncovered two large pieces of the sculpture and a third, smaller piece. A fragment of an arm, a hand holding an apple, and two herms were also found alongside the statue. Two inscriptions were also apparently found with the Venus. One, transcribed by Dumont D'Urville, a French naval officer who arrived on Milos shortly after the discovery, commemorates a dedication by one Bakchios son of Satios, the assistant gymnasiarch. The other, recorded on a drawing made by Auguste Debay, names Alexandros of Antioch. Both inscriptions are now lost. Other sculptural fragments found around the same time include a third herm, two further arms, and a foot with sandal.
Dumont D'Urville wrote an account of the find. According to his testimony, the Venus statue was found in a quadrangular niche. If this findspot were the original context for the Venus, the niche and the gymnasiarch's inscription suggests that the Venus de Milo was installed in the gymnasium of Melos. An alternative theory proposed by Salomon Reinach is that the findspot was instead the remains of a lime kiln, and that the other fragments had no connection to the Venus; this theory is dismissed by Christofilis Maggidis as having "no factual basis".
After stopping in Melos, D'Urville's ship sailed to Constantinople, where he reported the find to the Comte de Marcellus, assistant to Charles François de Riffardeau, marquis de Rivière, the French ambassador. Rivière agreed that Marcellus should go to Melos to buy the statue. By the time Marcellus arrived at Melos, the farmer who discovered the statue had already received another offer to buy it, and it had been loaded onto a ship; the French intervened and Marcellus was able to buy the Venus. It was brought to France, bought by Louis XVIII, and installed in the Louvre.
Identification
The Venus de Milo is probably a sculpture of the goddess Aphrodite, but its fragmentary state makes secure identification difficult. The earliest written accounts of the sculpture, by a French captain and the French vice-consul on Melos, both identify it as representing Aphrodite holding the apple of discord, apparently on the basis of the hand holding an apple found with the sculpture. An alternative identification proposed by Reinach is that she represents the sea-goddess Amphitrite, and was originally grouped with a sculpture of Poseidon from Melos, discovered in 1878. Other proposed identifications include a Muse, Nemesis, or Sappho.
The authorship and date of the Venus de Milo were both disputed from its discovery. Within a month of its acquisition by the Louvre, three French scholars had published papers on the statue, disagreeing on all aspects of its interpretation: Toussaint-Bernard Éméric-David thought it dated to , between Phidias and Praxiteles; Quatremère de Quincy attributed it to the mid-fourth century and the circle of Praxiteles; and the Comte de Clarac thought it a later copy of a work by Praxiteles. The scholarly consensus in the 19th century was that the Venus dated to the fourth century BC. At the end of the 19th century, Adolf Furtwängler was the first to argue that it was in fact late Hellenistic, dating to , and this dating continues to be widely accepted.
One of the inscriptions discovered with the statue, which was drawn by Debay as fitting into the missing section of the statue's base, names the sculptor as Alexandros of Antioch on the Maeander. The inscription must therefore date to after 280 BC, when Antioch was founded; the lettering of the inscription suggests a date of 150–50 BC. Maggidis argues based on this inscription, as well as the style of the statue and the increasing prosperity of Melos in the period due to Roman involvement on the island which he suggests is a plausible context for the commissioning of the sculpture, that it probably dates to . Rachel Kousser, though doubting the association of the Alexandros plaque with the Venus, agrees with Furtwängler's dates for the sculpture. Marianne Hamiaux suggests . Jean-Luc Martinez argues that the Alexandros inscription was not part of the Venus.
Reconstructions
Without arms, it is unclear what the statue originally looked like. The original appearance of the Venus has been disputed since 1821, with de Clarac arguing that the Venus was a single figure holding an apple, whereas Quatremere held that she was part of a group, with her arms around another figure. Other proposed restorations have included the Venus holding wreaths, a dove, or spears.
Wilhelm Fröhner suggested in 1876 that the Venus de Milo's right hand held the drapery slipping down from her hips, while the left held an apple; this theory was expanded on by Furtwängler. Kousser considers this the "most plausible" reconstruction.
Hamiaux suggests that the Venus de Milo is of the same sculptural type as the Capuan Venus and another sculpture of Aphrodite from Perge. She argues that all derive from the cult statue in the temple of Aphrodite on the Acrocorinth, which depicted Aphrodite admiring herself in a shield.
Fame
Upon its discovery in 1820, the Venus de Milo was considered to be a significant artistic finding, but did not gain its status as an icon until later on. The Louvre and in turn, French art as a whole, had suffered great losses when Napoleon Bonaparte's looted art collection was returned to their countries of origin. The museum lost some of its most iconic pieces, such as the Vatican Museums' Laocoön and His Sons and the Uffizi Gallery's Venus de' Medici. The hole that the restitutions left in French culture allowed the perfect path for the Venus de Milo to become an international icon. Based on early drawings, the plinth that had been detached from the statue was known to have dates on it, which revealed that it was created after the Classical period, which was the most desirable artistic period. This caused the French to hide the plinth, in an effort to conceal this fact before the statue's introduction to the Louvre in 1821. The Venus de Milo held a prime spot in the gallery, and became iconic, mostly due to the Louvre's branding campaign and emphasis on the statue's importance in order to regain national pride.
The great fame of the Venus de Milo during the 19th century owed much to a major propaganda effort by the French authorities. In 1815, France had returned the Venus de' Medici (also known as the Medici Venus) to the Italians. The Medici Venus, regarded as one of the finest classical sculptures in existence, caused the French to promote the Venus de Milo as a greater treasure than that which they recently had lost. The statue was praised dutifully by many artists and critics as the epitome of graceful female beauty. However, Pierre-Auguste Renoir was among its detractors, calling it "as beautiful as a gendarme".
Second World War
During the beginning of the German invasions during World War II, Jacques Jaujard, the director of the French Musées Nationaux, anticipating the fall of France, decided to organize the evacuation of the Louvre art collection to the provinces.
Venus de Milo, along with The Winged Victory of Samothrace, was kept at Château de Valençay. In August 1944, the Château was the site of combat between maquis, Vichy and German forces, and at one point German soldiers forced their way into the Château.
Reception
Today the Venus de Milo is perhaps the most famous ancient Greek statue in the world, seen by more than seven million visitors every year. It established itself as a key part of the Louvre's antiquities collection soon after its discovery. At this time, the Louvre had recently lost several major works following the Napoleonic Wars, as objects acquired by Napoleon were returned to their countries of origin. The Venus was soon one of the most famous antiquities in Europe; in the 19th century it was distributed in plaster casts, photographs, and bronze copies. A plaster cast was sent to the Berlin Academy in 1822, only a year after the Louvre acquired the Venus, and a cast was displayed at The Crystal Palace.
The Venus de Milo has been the subject of both literature and the visual arts since its discovery. More than 70 poems about the Venus have been published. In the 19th century paintings of the Venus often depicted statuettes of the figure, for instance in Honoré Daumier's The Connoisseur. 19th-century artists also used the Venus as a model: Max Klinger based the Minerva in his Judgement of Paris on the Venus de Milo; Eugene Delacroix may have used it for Liberty Leading the People.
In the early 20th century, the Venus de Milo caught the attention of the surrealist movement. Erwin Blumenfeld and Clarence Sinclair Bull both made photomontages based on the Venus. Max Ernst used the Venus in his "instruction manuals"; René Magritte painted a plaster copy of the Venus, making her body pink, her robe blue, and leaving the head white; and Salvador Dalì based several paintings and sculptures, including his painting The Hallucinogenic Toreador, on her. In contemporary art, Niki de Saint-Phalle has used a reproduction of the Venus in a performance, Yves Klein produced a copy in International Klein Blue, and artists including Arman, Clive Barker, and Jim Dine have all made sculptures inspired by the Venus.
The iconic status of the Venus de Milo has meant that in the 20th century it has been used in film and advertising: a poster for the 1932 film Blonde Venus shows Marlene Dietrich as the Venus de Milo, while in 2003 Eva Green, wearing only a white sheet and black arm-length gloves, recreated the sculpture in The Dreamers. Actresses have frequently been compared to the Venus: an article in Photoplay in 1928 concluded the Joan Crawford was the Hollywood actress whose measurements most resembled the Venus de Milo, Clara Bow and Jean Harlow were both photographed as the Venus for magazines. Advertisements for Levi's jeans and Mercedes Benz cars have used the Venus.
See also
Aphrodite of Knidos
Notes
References
Sources
Venus de Milo: The Oxford Dictionary of Art
James Grout, Venus de Milo, part of the Encyclopædia Romana
External links
"Ideal Greek Beauty: Venus de Milo and the Galerie des Antiques", Louvre Museum
3D model of Venus de Milo, produced from the plaster cast at Skulpturhalle Basel
"How the Venus de Milo got so famous", Vox
1820 archaeological discoveries
Hellenistic sculpture
Ancient Milos
2nd-century BC sculptures
Ancient Greek and Roman sculptures in the Louvre
Archaeological discoveries in Greece
Nude sculptures
Marble sculptures in France
Female beauty