November 10, 2003

Art and artifice
A new book traces the historical intrigue surrounding the Venus de Milo

By Marc Spiegler

Published November 9, 2003

Disarmed: The Story of the Venus de Milo

By Gregory Curtis

Knopf, 237 pages, $24

Standing before Classical artworks, our thoughts often veer toward the eternal. That's understandable. These paintings and statues have captivated viewers for centuries, if not millenniums, through wars, famines and revolutions. In their presence, we feel connected to their creators and to all those who conserved these pieces for our benefit.

Emotionally, that's a warm thought; intellectually, it's pretty fuzzy. Because the way we look at a Classical sculpture has little to do with how our ancestors saw it. Artworks are fundamentally objects, and like all objects their role is shaped by context. With all the subtlety of a charging fullback, Marcel Duchamp famously made this point by proposing a porcelain urinal as his contribution to a 1917 exhibit. Granted, whether that vulgarly utilitarian object could be art was highly debated at the time; today, you would have to mortgage a mansion to buy a Duchamp-certified reproduction.

Those who decried Duchamp might well have pointed to the Venus de Milo as a prime example of "real" art. Now, no one has ever disputed whether the sculpture is art. But its history likewise reveals the critical impact of context, as Gregory Curtis details in "Disarmed: The Story of the Venus de Milo," which traces the statue's tale, including the diplomatic, political and cultural feuds that surrounded it. Written in fluid, magazine-style modules, Curtis' book focuses on the characters whose trajectories crossed that of the Venus de Milo--including soldiers, envoys and art historians--showing how each influenced the object's destiny.

Discovered in 1820 on the small Greek island of Melos, the statue quickly became the subject of fever-pitched negotiations between France, because the work had been unearthed during an archeological dig led by a French navy ensign, and the Ottoman Empire, to which the island belonged. The French won, but only through a series of coincidences. Count Marcellus, the diplomat who finally secured the sculpture for his country, undertook the mission as cover for pursuing a sexual obsession he had developed after seeing a Melos woman's painted portrait. When he arrived in the island's harbor, the statue was already sitting on a Russian frigate waiting to be transported to Constantinople; an Ottoman envoy had persuaded the local prelates to hand over the find. Fortunately for France, bad weather locked down the harbor long enough for negotiations to swing the count's way.

When the statue got to Paris, it was not Marcellus who was bathed in glory but rather Jules Sebastien-Cesar Dumont d'Urville, whose claim to fame was discovering the statue. "Claim" is the operative word here; by the time d'Urville saw the Venus de Milo, his navy colleague Olivier Voutier's team of local workers had long since unearthed it, the top half had been transported to a nearby barn, and four French naval captains had already viewed it. Nonetheless, when the statue reached French soil, d'Urville published a report in which he replaced Voutier as the dig's hero. D'Urville's stories became fact, launching his brilliant military career.

Voutier would resurface much later, in the biggest battle over the statue, concerning when it was created. Along with the halves that make up today's Venus de Milo, Voutier and his local hired hands discovered a pedestal inscribed with Greek words that translate to " . . . xandros son of Menides citizen of Antioch of Meander made the statue." From an art-historical standpoint, this carved phrase might seem invaluable; the city of Antioch having only been founded in 270 B.C., the words gave a solid basis for dating the statue. But in the Parisian cultural politics of the 1820s, they boded disaster. No one knew of a sculptor named Alexandros. Worse yet, the zenith of Greece's golden age ended at least a century before Antioch's rise, and artworks from the later era connoted by the pedestal were considered derivative products from a culture already well in decline.

This issue was hardly academic. At the time the Venus de Milo reached Paris, France's national pride was still wounded from the selective pillaging of the Louvre by German, British and Austrian armies (accompanied by art experts) after Napolean's defeat at Waterloo. Deepening the wound, Europe's reigning cultural dogma held that no culture could be great without having major holdings in Classical Greek art. This idea had been evangelized by German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who died decades before Voutier's discovery. Curtis allots an extended chapter to Winckelmann because his writings set the intellectual stage for the statue's arrival. "One reason the Venus de Milo became so famous so quickly is that she arrived in France at the precise moment when the neoclassicism of the past gave way to the romanticism of the future," Curtis explains. "Since the neoclassicists, like Winckelmann, believed in imitating classical art, and since the romantics, also like Winckelmann, believed that great art was the result of personal and political freedom, each side could embrace the Venus de Milo in its fight against the other."

Both factions, then, desperately needed an incontestable Classical masterpiece. Two actions made that desire a reality: In choosing between the only two scholars eminent enough to introduce the statue to the public, the Louvre's director picked the one prepared to designate it a 4th Century work from the workshop of Greece's greatest sculptor, Praxiteles. Simultaneously, the inscribed pedestal contradicting this assertion disappeared forever--but its impact remained because both Voutier and a young Parisian art student had already sketched it.

Decades later, those drawings would help fuel one of the late 19th Century's greater intellectual rivalries, between Germany's Adolf Furtwaengler--among the godfathers of modern-day archeology--and France's less rigorous but equally passionate Salomon Reinach, who doggedly defended the statue's Classical status. The two men also contributed mightily to the eternal debate over the position of the statue's missing arms: Hypotheses include her holding an apple aloft, leaning upon the shoulder of Ares, or holding a trident (in which case she wouldn't even be Venus, but rather Amphitrite, queen of the sea).

Curtis traces such feuds and the lives of their protagonists in detail. At times, unfortunately, he focuses too long on some players, unspooling mini-biographies rather than just setting up their essential backstory, rolling them onstage with the statue and then dispatching them quickly once their role is done. (Granted, the fact that Louis XVIII's sex life was limited to sniffing snuff off a courtesan's breasts is a great historical anecdote, but it's pretty tangential to the Venus de Milo's story.) That said, Curtis does a solid job of presenting art history as narrative non-fiction, moving the statue swiftly across many epochs and giving a taste of what it meant to each.

To those who love the statue today, for example, the uniform alabaster smoothness of its form is essential. Yet in situ on its native island, "the Venus de Milo, whose image we know so well, would have been barely recognizable to us," Curtis says. "She stood in the shadows of [an outdoor] niche, competing for attention with the pattern painted on the walls. She wore jewels on her head, ears and arms. The marble of her torso was polished. Her hair was painted gold; her eyes and lips were red."

The ancient Melians would be equally befuddled to see their Venus today. In the Sully Wing of the Louvre, the 61/2-foot-tall statue towers over the tourists who have sprinted past other artifacts to see her. At her feet, a constant crowd jostles each other, not so much to admire her form as to have their pictures taken beside her. Because most of their cameras are digital, the tourists often focus most intently upon the LCD screens inches from their noses. Naturally, being marble, the statue's features don't change, just like those of a starlet with a red-carpet perma-smile. In the age of celebrity, the Venus de Milo has become an instantly pixelized pop star.

Marc Spiegler, who is based in Zurich, writes regularly about artists and the art market