Gregory Curtis
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Upon his return, he became obsessed with the idea of sending French artists to England to make casts of the Elgin marbles for the Louvre. Then he expanded the notion to other massive casts, including one of Michelangelo’s Moses. He wanted to commission Ingres and three other French artists to copy the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, exhibit it at one of the yearly salons at the Louvre, and then place it permanently in Notre Dame. These schemes, which seem preposterous today, were to Forbin “proof of [France’s] love of the arts and our eagerness to bring together such precious means of study for our artists.” He was again merely repeating the ideas of Winckelmann, which had by now become accepted wisdom: Arts flourished where there was an accumulation of masterpieces or copies of masterpieces for artists to study and imitate.
Of course, an original masterpiece was considered infinitely more valuable than a copy. With the Apollo Belvedere returned to the Vatican and the Elgin marbles the property of the British Museum, France had no equivalent example of antique art. This lamentable situation was not just a blow to national pride; it was a lack in what France could offer her artists for study and inspiration. In the future, French arts would suffer because of it and consequently lag behind artists in England and Italy, perhaps for generations. France, instead of advancing as the third great civilization in Europe after classical Greece and Renaissance Italy, would slip slowly into the second-rate. It was a problem for which there appeared to be no solution.
In addition to his worries about the museum, Forbin was on the brink of despair over his health, his family, and his legacy as an artist. He was now in his early forties and time had begun to erode both his looks and his constitution. He had frequent colds that he could not cure. Often he suffered from the sensation that all the blood was rushing out of his head. He stopped drinking and ate only simple foods, but any physical effort exhausted him. Still, he pushed himself to work harder, uncertain how much longer he would be able to work at all.
As he worried about his health he also brooded about his family. He hadn’t been the best of husbands, but at a time when most marriages were arranged, especially among Forbin’s social class, a wife and husband having separate lives and separate lovers was common and accepted. His wife despised Paris and insisted on living in her family’s château in Burgundy with her mother and her two daughters. Forbin visited them there, sometimes staying a month or longer, but these visits were always painful. His wife was a lazy, ineffective woman who spent most of her days bickering endlessly with her mother. Forbin hated his mother-in-law passionately. Now widowed, she controlled the family fortune with tight fists.
Forbin’s daughters, Lydia and Valentine, had grown up in this tense, stingy atmosphere. Lydia was twenty and needed to enter society to find a husband, but she was plagued by a skin condition on her face and body that marred her appearance. Without his mother-in-law’s financial help, which she adamantly refused to give, Forbin was despondent about Lydia’s chances. Valentine was sixteen and a beauty. She adored her father, but she was a quiet, passive girl who could never express her affection in a way he understood or believed in. Forbin’s wife consistently demanded money from him although all he had was his salary from the Louvre and whatever he could earn from his painting—and his works were no longer selling. His daughters’ unpleasant lives and shaky futures bore down on him. He couldn’t help them; nor, if his own health failed, could his daughters or his wife help him. But worst of all, Forbin was tortured by the knowledge that this late in life no one took him seriously as an artist or a man. His looks and his social gifts were so overwhelming that, except for Granet, few of his contemporaries could see anything else in him. He was considered a lightweight with artistic pretensions. E. J. Delecluze, an important critic, novelist, and memoirist, who had known Forbin since they were both young art students in Paris, expressed exactly what the world thought of Forbin:
It is unfortunate for a man when the subtleties of his personality are not deeper than those of the clothes he wears and one will always reproach M. de Forbin for that. He had received some precious gifts from nature, but he neglected to cultivate them in order to seek the appearance of a greatness that his position did not give him, that his varied but puny talents will not acquire for him, and from which the buffoonery of his conversation removes even the idea.
Delecluze was right that Forbin wanted the appearance of greatness, but he did not understand that the key to Forbin’s character was that he also wanted greatness itself, greatness as a painter and as a friend of art. Though he squandered time on Pauline Borghese and a succession of other intrigues, and though he became enamored of his own legend—he seems to have been seduced by his own looks and charm—Forbin worked on his painting throughout his life, often for periods of intense concentration. When possible he was in his studio from eight in the morning until after six in the evening. “I’m working like a rabid dog,” he wrote Granet. He had conceived of a grand canvas titled L’Inquisition. When he finished, he wrote Granet, “I believe I have done nothing that can approach its combination of color and execution.” But the rumor spread, as Forbin had feared it would since there had been similar rumors before, that Forbin’s painting was really the work of Granet.
Then, late in the winter of 1820, as if in answer to a prayer, a letter came to the Louvre from the marquis de Rivière. He was in Toulon, where he had arrived on the Lionne with what he claimed was one of the greatest masterpieces of Greek sculpture wrapped in canvas and carefully stored belowdecks.
D’Urville returns
DESPITE THE turbulence of his mind, and despite a persistent cold that he was treating with leeches, Forbin responded decisively, even bravely, to the letter from the marquis. The letter itself is lost, but from the flurry of internal correspondence it caused at the Louvre, it’s easy to guess what it said: Rivière asked for money, and Forbin gave it to him. On January 4, 1821, Forbin sent a letter authorizing the necessary expenses to have the statue unloaded from the ship, crated, and brought to Paris. Forbin had had to dicker with his superiors for permission—this consumed much of his time during the Christmas season of 1820—but he didn’t falter, even though he was being asked to invest in a work of art he had never seen.
Six weeks later, in mid-February, the marquis de Rivière and the Venus de Milo arrived in Paris. In a private audience with Louis XVIII on March 1, 1821, Rivière offered the king the statue for the royal museums. The homage was accepted. Consequently, Forbin had to reimburse Rivière the 1,500 francs he had paid for the statue and the cost of the shipping. But now the Venus de Milo belonged to France. Forbin had the statue delivered to the Louvre.
(In 1826 Rivière made another payment from his own funds that has prevented the bitter diplomatic problems that still plague the Elgin marbles. The dragoman Morousi had fined the primates on Melos more than 7,500 piasters for allowing the statue to be carried away. A French admiral in the Aegean wrote to the Ministry of the Marine that the primates wanted reimbursement. After hearing this news, Rivière repaid the primates himself. In return, they signed a quittance to any further claims for money or for the statue, which has been honored. In the early 1980s, when the actress Melina Mercouri, who had become the Greek minister of culture and science, began demanding the return of the Elgin marbles from England, she repeatedly declined to make any claim for the Venus de Milo.)
But this beautiful statue from Melos—what exactly was it? Forbin had acquired it assuming that it was beyond doubt a masterpiece from the classical age of Greece, around 450 to 350 B.C. Rivière’s letter to Forbin had quoted the opinion of Fauvel, the French consul in Athens who had seen the Venus aboard ship in the moonlight. According to Rivière’s letter, Fauvel said that the statue was a masterpiece “worth at least 100,000 ecus.” Forbin knew Fauvel. He had visited him during his recent voyage to Greece and Egypt and considered him “our Nestor of eastern antiquities.” Fauvel’s endorsement gave Forbin the assurance to go forward. But if the statue was anything but a product of the classi
cal age in Greece, then its value would presumably fall far below 100,000 ecus. Worse, it could not stand with the Elgin marbles in England or the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican as the great prize whose glory animated, even sanctified, the national identity.
Cautiously, Forbin sequestered the statue in a back workshop of the Louvre, where he allowed only a few trustworthy scholars and artists to see it. The custom at that time was to repair and restore broken statues. That meant the scholars had to determine the original position of the arms. Doing that meant deciding what the statue had originally been. Which goddess was she? What was she doing?
But Forbin couldn’t wait patiently for these scholarly investigations to take their course. The first report from the museum needed to express the only opinion that would satisfy Forbin, the king, indeed all of France: that the statue was a Venus from the classical age. Having the right scholar state this opinion in a convincing way was necessary to protect the investment in both money and pride that the French had made in this statue. Forbin had to find that scholar.
Unfortunately, word about the statue had already begun to leak out. Dumont d’Urville had arrived back in France in October 1820 after the Chevrette had finished its scientific mission in the Black Sea. Still consumed by the need to create a personal legend, he couldn’t wait to take advantage of the opportunity presented to him by the statue from Melos. On November 24, 1820, he read a paper—“Account of an hydrographic expedition in the Levant and the Black Sea by his majesty’s ship the Chevrette commanded by M. Gautier, captain of the vessel, in the year 1820”—to the Society of Sciences and Arts of Toulon. He then read the same paper to the Academy of Sciences in Paris on January 22, 1821.
D’Urville is the hero of his own paper. He describes the farmer digging for rocks, finding the niche, and taking the upper half of the statue to the cowshed. He talks about going to see the statue himself, but he never explains how he came to do so or alludes to anyone else, although Brest and Matterer were certainly there with him. He does not mention that Brest and the four ships’ captains all had seen the statue before he had. He did originally thank the faithful Matterer and some others, but only for their roles after the discovery. He deleted these words from his final version.
Since his report was the first news of the statue to be published in France, d’Urville was able to cement the public perception that he had been the sole discoverer of the Venus de Milo. He instantly became what he longed to be: a famous man. As he wrote in his journal in the weeks after reading his paper, “Thus the obscure ensign, thirty and one-half years old, with more than seven years at that rank, is suddenly the one sought out by artists, recognized by experts, welcomed by eminent persons.” In August 1821 d’Urville wrote a letter proposing himself for membership in a provincial learned society named the Academy of Caen, the city in Normandy where he had attended school. He boasted, “I owe to a lucky happenstance the opportunity to be the first to visit, describe and make known the celebrated Venus Victrix of Melos.” Beginning exactly here, his fame would continue to grow until it extended throughout Europe.
An embarrassment appears and disappears
AT LEAST d’Urville had said only that the statue was a Venus and, for once recognizing his limitations, had not hazarded an opinion about when it was made. The damage was not as bad as it might have been, but d’Urville’s self-promotion tended to force Forbin’s hand. He had to display the statue soon, since public pressure to see it would become greater as the news continued to spread. On March 7, 1821, he had the first official announcement about the acquisition of the statue placed in the Moniteur, a government newspaper. It concluded with an assertion that inadvertently expressed both Forbin’s hopes and his frustrations: “Experts are busy researching what must have been the position of the arms in order to proceed with the restoration. The very pronounced movement of the torso seems to assure the success of this research soon.”
This public confidence was contrary to the confusion the statue was creating deep in the workshops of the Louvre. Unfortunately, each of the sages Forbin admitted there had his own opinion about the original position of the arms.
In truth, they weren’t researching so much as groping in the dark. Archeology barely existed as a science then, and the whole world of Greek antiquity was just being rediscovered. Very little reliable information was available, while a great deal of mistaken information was accepted as true. For example, any statue unearthed in Italy was considered to be an ancient original. Then a duplicate would turn up at another site, and yet another at a third place. By 1821 scholars were slowly beginning to realize how many copies of famous statues had been carved in ancient times. A few years after the discovery of the Venus de Milo, even the revered Apollo Belvedere was proved to be a Roman copy.
Since the science of archeology was just beginning to develop, a critic who was writing about antiquities could let his mind range freely, unfettered by inconvenient facts. Papers that at the time were considered learned and scientific seem today like the most indulgent flights of fancy. And the scholars at the Louvre let their fancies soar. Some thought the statue was not a Venus but a Victory. Others thought it was a Venus holding a bow. Or maybe she was holding a shield and gazing at her reflection in it. And, of course, each of their proposed reconstructions would produce a different position for the arms.
But unexpectedly, perhaps even disastrously, the statue presented other problems that were just as difficult as her missing arms. When Forbin’s staff unwrapped the parcels of canvas containing the Venus de Milo, they found that four pieces had broken away from the hips. Two came from the right hip and two from the left. These four pieces had first broken away in ancient times and been reattached with plaster. The large piece from the right hip that Voutier had described was the only piece broken when the statue left Melos. The three others must have broken away during the sea voyage to France when humidity or the rocking of the ship loosened the plaster. No surviving record from that period mentions these pieces at all, and we know about them only from events that occurred fifty years later. The restorers in the back workshop reattached the four pieces with plaster, two on one hip and two on the other, assuming that no one would ever discover how much their handiwork had affected the statue.
Nor did the complications stop there. The base of the herm with the young man’s head was broken so that its right side formed a jagged wedge. The base of the Venus de Milo was broken on its left side, where there was a jagged cavity. The wedge on the base of the herm slid nicely into the cavity at the base of the statue. It appeared, therefore, that this undistinguished herm and its base once belonged to the Venus de Milo. Worse, there was an inscription in Greek on the base of the herm that read, “… xandros son of Menides citizen of Antioch of Meander made the statue.” If the base of the statue and the base of the herm were originally the same slab, then an unknown sculptor named Alexandros had carved the Venus de Milo. And worst of all, Alexandros had lived in Antioch, a city in western Turkey that, as the scholars at the Louvre well knew, had not been founded until 270 B.C., at least a hundred years after the classical age in Greece had ended.
According to Winckelmann’s theory of the cycles of art, that would have been a time when art was in decline. Had Forbin committed the museum, the king, and all of France to a statue by a nobody who had lived too late to have had any contact at all with the great Greek masters? If so, all Dumont d’Urville’s bragging before learned societies and in the salons of Paris would only add to the museum’s embarrassment when the real story came to light.
Slowly a solution appeared. The more the experts at the Louvre pondered the problem, the more they thought the base was wrong. The fit wasn’t right after all, and the marble wasn’t the same. And even if the base did belong with the statue, it could not have belonged to it originally. It must be the remains of some later, decadent addition made during the declining Hellenistic era. It was an ugly barnacle on the hull of a sleek yacht. Worse than that, the inscribed base wa
s a threat to the statue’s very integrity. Anyone who was jealous of France’s prize possession could use this inscription to denigrate it, to cheapen it. Since the slab was not really, truly part of the statue, why give anyone this ammunition to use against France’s treasure?
So the slab disappeared. Forbin either had it destroyed or hid it so deeply in some recess of the warehouses of the Louvre that it has never been found. We would not know about it today, and certainly we would have no idea what the inscription said, except for Forbin’s loyalty to his difficult, conceited, yet inspiring former teacher David.
David had read the notice in the Moniteur about the statue. He was now living in Brussels, where he had fled after the Restoration, certain that the new regime would want his head. In fact, Louis XVIII put aside any malice he may have felt. Through intermediaries he implied to David that if he were to petition to return, he would be granted amnesty. But David, instead of petitioning, which he saw as demeaning to his dignity, remained in Brussels, seething with resentment. But a statue from classical Greece was irresistible for someone with David’s aesthetic, and he wanted to see what it looked like. He wrote to Paris to ask to have a drawing sent to him.
Auguste Debay’s drawing of the Venus de Milo with inscribed base (illustration credit 3.2)
David’s request fell to the sculptor J. B. J. Debay, who had been a student in David’s school at the same time as Forbin. Now he was the curator in charge of antique restorations at the Louvre. Debay gave the task to his sixteen-year-old son, Auguste, who was an art student. Forbin allowed him into the back workshop in order to make the drawing and this happened to be during the time when the inscribed base was still in place against the base of the statue. Young Debay, either unconcerned by or unaware of the debate over the base and the inscription, drew them both quite clearly. The jagged edge of the inscribed base seems to match the jagged edge at the base of the statue. The Greek letters of the inscription are clear.