Gregory Curtis

by Disarmed: The Story of the Venus De Milo

  Debay made one original drawing and then a tracing of it. The tracing went to David. Debay gave the original to his father. Forbin either forgot or never knew the elder Debay had the drawing until it was too late.

  The right scholar

  MEANWHILE the Louvre continued to remain silent about the statue. At the time there were two dominating classical scholars in France, either of whom could write the first paper that would establish the museum’s thinking about its new treasure. One was Quatremère de Quincy, a Winckelmann disciple who had introduced David to the wonders of antiquity in Naples more than thirty years earlier. The other was Toussaint-Bernard Emeric-David. These two men were bitter intellectual rivals who seem to have disliked each other personally as well. They were about the same age—Quatremère was sixty-six and Emeric-David sixty-five—and as young men had both studied for the law. They both had gotten in trouble during the Revolution—Quatremère was sent to jail on a warrant signed by David—and neither ever shrank from a good scrap. But the resemblances end there. Quatremère was effete and remote, whereas Emeric-David was an energetic man of the world, devoted to his family, who had broad intellectual interests. Those differences alone might have been enough to make them wary of each other, but they became enemies because of their different responses to Winckelmann.

  In short, Emeric-David disagreed with Winckelmann, while Quatremère embraced him. Emeric-David did not believe, as Winckelmann did, that art moved in a cycle of four stages from beginning to development to flowering to decadence and decline. He thought Greek art in particular had not declined after the classical period but had a long, glorious history from the time of Phidias until at least the Roman emperor Hadrian in the first half of the second century. And since art didn’t move in cycles, there was no reason to think that art in France was in hopeless decline. It could flourish just as Greek art had.

  For Quatremère all this was simply a heresy, and a fatuous one at that. European art was clearly in decline after the great flowering during the Renaissance, just as Greek art had declined after the classical age. The only way to revive art was to imitate the ancient masters as Winckelmann had said.

  Since Forbin’s temperament was closer to that of Emeric-David, and since both men were raised in Aix and had extensive family ties in Provence, he would seem to have been Forbin’s natural ally. But Emeric-David, free of the prevailing orthodoxy derived from Winckelmann, didn’t believe that the statue from Melos belonged to the classical era of ancient Greece. He thought it was from a later period. Nor did he think it was a Venus. Instead he concluded that the statue represented the nymph Melos, the divine guardian of the island. For Forbin, this would not do at all.

  Quatremère, stuffy and superior though he may have been, was at least dependable. He was a dour but impressive man with dark black eyebrows and cropped white hair. He had a long, hatchet nose, heavy bags beneath his eyes, a thin mouth, and a double chin. He used his voice, which boomed from his chest, as a cudgel in debate. Independently wealthy (his family had made its fortune selling drapery to Louis XVI) and inspired by Winckelmann, he had lived in Italy for eight years during his twenties. Since then, the art of the classical age in Greece had become the basis for all his aesthetic theories and judgments. He elaborated his thinking in a blizzard of books, articles, reviews, and papers across a lifetime of ninety-four years. The further art moved from his ideals, the more he wrote and the more his prose became pompous and doctrinaire. In 1816 he had become permanent secretary of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, a position he would hold until 1839. Thus elevated, he was able to toss down his opinions from on high like Zeus raining thunderbolts. His influence on David alone changed the course of French art.

  Unlike Forbin, with his mistresses and his charming way with fashionable hostesses, Quatremère found nothing interesting or attractive about women. On the contrary, he disliked them intensely and never married. His closest emotional attachment was a nobleman he met in Italy who was also a painter and sculptor. Otherwise he lived entirely for the sake of his stern ideas, theories, and dogmas.

  Just two years earlier Forbin and Quatremère had quarreled rather bitterly. Quatremère wanted the Académie to judge the art in the museum’s Salon of 1819 only after the show had been taken down. Forbin wanted the judging done while the show was still up so that visitors could know the winners. The real reason for the argument—carried out in highly formal but steely letters—was that Forbin had accepted the Raft of the Medusa by Géricault for the salon. This painting introduced romanticism to French art, and romanticism, which imitated nature directly rather than basing itself on the Greek ideal of nature, and which honored individual feeling over classical rules, rejected everything Quatremère believed about art. He hoped to diminish the effect of Géricault’s painting on the public by delaying the judging. Forbin as always was a difficult opponent to outmaneuver, and his views prevailed.

  Yet for all his bluster, for all his fruitless determination to bend art in France to his reactionary ideas, for all his humorless severity, Quatremère did have a formidable intellect. And when he was observing a work of art that fit his aesthetic theories, especially one like the Venus de Milo that not only fit his theories but in his eyes proved them, he had formidable judgment as well. Best of all for Forbin, Quatremère believed the statue was exactly what the museum wanted it to be. Forbin trusted Quatremère, his former combatant, in the back room of the Louvre and ignored Emeric-David, the fellow son of Provence.

  On April 21, 1821, just six weeks after the statue arrived at the Louvre, Quatremère read a paper entitled “Dissertation on the antique statue of Venus discovered on the island of Melos” to a meeting of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The Académie was the leading official institution concerned with the fine arts, and its members were the best possible audience to endorse the paper’s conclusions about the statue. Forbin had known what the paper said—and that it said the right thing—before the meeting. But the result was successful beyond his most ambitious dreams.

  Quatremère begins with a simple—for him—statement of why the statue was so important: “The appearance of a new work of Greek genius is always an event in the empire of the arts, above all when unimpeachable testimonies of the authenticity or the presumable originality of this work add the weight of their authority to the judgment of taste.” In other words, this is an authoritative statue because it is beautiful and because the evidence proves that it is truly Greek. Of course, he continues, the same is true of the Elgin marbles, so recently arrived in England. Both the scholar and the public can have confidence in them, although not in “most of these antique remnants, that come down to us without a title, without a date, without the name of an author or a country, without any certificate as to their origin.” So he loses no time in proclaiming this statue to be the equal of the Elgin marbles, even though it had arrived in France without a title, a date, or any certificate of its origin.

  He continues with a brief account of the discovery and a detailed description with special attention to the scrapes, gouges, and other ravages of time. (Few if any in his Académie audience had seen the statue yet.) He does mention the inscribed base, only to insist in a footnote that it was a later addition whose purpose was merely to help support the statue. This block, chosen at random, happened to be inscribed, but “one cannot draw any conclusion relating to the creator of the work from the inscription on the piece of marble.” Perhaps it was his conscience that led him to mention the inscription at all. He does not record what the inscription actually said.

  Quatremère insists that the statue is a Venus. More than that, upon his very first sight of the statue, the turn of her body and the position and expression of her head made him think that she must have originally been grouped with another statue. By examining more closely the left side, “where the drapes are far less carefully done, in considering the much less happy effect of the face on that side,” he became certain that he was right.

  But what was the other statue?
Quatremère cites several other statues, medallions, and coins that show Venus with her body turned to the left and her left foot resting on some support in a pose similar to that of the Venus de Milo. Next to her stands Mars, the god of war. Venus’s left arm is on his shoulder, and her right reaches across to touch his right biceps. She hopes that her beauty will restrain him so he will stay with her instead of going to war. Therefore, Quatremère concludes, the Venus de Milo must also have been originally grouped with a statue of Mars. The missing arms must have been reaching out to him, touching him on the shoulder and arm. The look on her face, turned imploringly toward him, is her yearning for him to stay. Quatremère also argues that the arms of the statue broke off when it was separated from the statue of Mars and that the other pieces found with the Venus—the hand with the apple, fragments of arms, the two herms—were all part of a later, crude restoration.

  After this grand moment, the rest of the paper is essentially nicely articulated propaganda for the statue and, by extension, for the museum. He speculates about whether the Venus de Milo was the original statue in this pose from which all the other examples were copied. He admits that it is impossible to know with certainty. “If, however,” he adds cleverly, “one wishes to understand [original] in a sense relating to the superiority of merit among the copies of the same work, there will be, I think, no reason to doubt that the Venus de Milo, in the group of which it was a part, was the original of those others that we have cited.” He declares that since the statue is clearly not from the decadent period of Greek art, it must have come from the workshop or the school of Praxiteles, the greatest of Greek sculptors. There is no support for this view other than the wishes of Quatremère, Forbin, the museum, the king, and the rest of France that it be true. England might have the marbles from the Parthenon designed by Phidias; but France, courtesy of Quatremère, could claim it possessed a work by the one Greek sculptor who was even greater.

  In his final three paragraphs Quatremère directly confronted the problem of restoring the arms. A modern curator would never consider adding whole new elements to an incomplete ancient work, but in the early nineteenth century restoration was the common practice. Quatremère swam against the current by arguing that the statue should not be restored at all. His reasoning was ingenious. He said Venus shouldn’t be restored because it would be impossible to create the second statue of Mars that originally went with it. “Even if,” he continued, “one were limited to restoring the arms, using the other works as a model for the restitution, that could only make one feel even more the emptiness and the absence of the figure to which she was joined; the statue, remaining always isolated, could only produce an equivocal movement and an action that nothing would explain to the viewer.”

  In fact, a few restorations to the statue were made at the Louvre. The broken tip of the nose was fixed, as were the nipple of the left breast and the lower lip. The most noticeable and unfortunate restoration was an ugly plaster left foot sticking out from under some even uglier plaster folds of drapery. But the arms were not restored. Often it’s said that Louis XVIII himself decreed that the statue should be left as it was. But Forbin made the decision not to restore the arms on the advice of Quatremère. It was this stiff, arrogant reactionary who prevented the harm to the statue—possibly severe—that any restoration of the two missing arms would have made inevitable.

  Clarac’s anger

  AT THIS time the conservator of antiquities at the Louvre was the comte de Clarac. The arrival of the statue from Melos, which technically was in his jurisdiction, should have been a crowning event in Clarac’s career. Instead it brought him nothing but frustration and grief.

  At forty-four, the same age as Forbin, Charles-Othon-Frédéric-Jean-Baptiste de Clarac was an odd, lovable busybody. He liked to spend an hour or two each morning carving fantasy objects in ivory on a lathe. Although he never married and his family line died out with him, he often spent evenings making elaborate jumping jacks for the children of his friends. He was frequently broke, despite his title, since his family’s property had been confiscated during the Revolution and he had to live on his meager salary from the Louvre. Yet he maintained the air of a bon vivant who loved good food and wine when he could afford them. Like Forbin, he had a gift for composing comic songs. One was a parody of the “Marseillaise.” The chorus of the original says,

  To arms, citizens!

  Form your battalions!

  March! March!

  Let impure blood water our furrows.

  Clarac’s version says,

  To arms, scullions

  Let’s uncork the flasks.

  Let’s drink, Let’s drink

  Let pure wine soak our lungs!

  (In French it’s cleverer: “Aux armes, marmitons, / Débouchons les flacons, / Buvons, buvons, / Qu’un vin bien pur abreuve nos poumons!”)

  Clarac spoke German, English, Italian, Portuguese, and one of the Polynesian languages. Exiled during the Revolution, an officer in armies that fought against the French republican forces, he returned to France during the Empire. Eventually he became tutor to the children of Napoleon’s sister Caroline in Italy. At the same time he directed some of the excavations at Pompeii. That was when he discovered his taste for archeology. Like Dumont d’Urville and most intellectuals of the era, he was also fascinated by botany. On a long voyage to South America he made precise and painstaking drawings of the flora of the Amazon.

  Clarac approached his job at the museum rather like a botanist: He cataloged and described relentlessly. His great work, which still has historical value today, was a complete inventory of the statuary possessed by the Louvre. Yet even those who were sympathetic to Clarac did not claim he was a distinguished scholar. Zealous, yes, and generous toward young artists and archeologists with both his time and his money. But finally his many varied interests served him poorly. He simply didn’t know enough about art or archeology. A friend wrote a sympathetic sketch of him after his death that declared, “There are antiquaries who are better informed than he was. He had neither the sagacity nor the critical perception of some erudite French, nor the vast knowledge of the Germans; nor did he have elegance and clarity as a writer.” And this was the opinion of a friend!

  Forbin, like everyone else, felt some affection for Clarac, but the inscribed base and the problems it presented made Clarac’s presence at the museum inconvenient. Who could tell what he was going to do or say? And whatever he said could cause a problem. If he said the right thing about the base inscribed with the name of a sculptor from Antioch—that is, that it didn’t belong to the statue—Clarac’s reputation was not weighty enough to make any difference. But if he said the wrong thing about the base—that is, that it did belong to the statue—his position as conservator of antiquities for the museum was important enough to raise questions about the base to the whole world. In any case he couldn’t be depended on to keep what the inscription said a secret. So Forbin simply froze him out. Assuming it was his duty, Clarac did write a brief paper on the statue intended for the king, but Forbin, who saw that Clarac’s paper did indeed say the wrong thing, pocketed it instead of sending it on.

  For all Forbin could tell, this strategy worked perfectly. Now, in late April 1821, with the inscribed base having been secreted away or destroyed and the question about restoring the arms resolved at last, all that remained for Forbin to do about the Venus was to decide where to display her in the Louvre. Meanwhile he wrote to Clarac asking him to have a marble pedestal inscribed with the name of the statue. To Forbin this was simply a routine request, but the letter sent Clarac into a fury. He took it as the most degrading in the series of recent affronts by Forbin. Why was this happening? Clarac couldn’t understand it. As conservator of antiquities, he would have been the proper choice to write a paper, not Quatremère. Clarac had suffered patiently, perhaps in deference to Quatremère’s august position and reputation. But now, as if everything were normal, here was this letter from Forbin. In response, Clarac wrot
e:

  I don’t really see why you address yourself to me to have the name of the statue inscribed. Ever since it came into the King’s possession and I sent you a notice on the subject—which one has not judged proper to bring to His Majesty’s attention—one has spoken to me of the statue only as if it was a stranger to me, or rather as if I were a stranger to the royal museum.… I am charged with the evaluation of ancient monuments, with their cataloging, with their placement, with their restoration, and with their casting. How does it happen, then, that it has been decided, without my knowing anything of it, and probably in a secret meeting, where I should have been called, that this statue would not be restored? … Also, how is it that I discovered yesterday all the preparations for placing this statue without my having received any notice?

  In his reply, which did not come until May 24, a delay of several weeks, Forbin offered no explanation, and certainly no apology, for Clarac’s complaints about being excluded. He did say that it was “pure forgetfulness that you have not been informed of my decision.” Then he added bluntly, “It was I who ordered the restoration of two Egyptian statues and I believe I remain completely authorized to take a similar measure every time it appears advisable to me.”

  Forbin simply proceeded with his plans. A few days later, sometime in late May 1821, without any great ceremony to mark the event, perhaps because the king had not yet seen the statue, the Venus de Milo was displayed to the public at the Louvre.

  Clarac was appalled. The statue had been put in the Salle de Diane, at the opposite end of the long corridor where the Venus now stands. During the Empire its name had been the Salle de l’Apollon, because this was where Denon had chosen to display the great Apollo Belvedere. The Venus de Milo would assume that statue’s former place of glory. But the setting wasn’t right for her. Her back was to a wall, so the statue could not be seen from every angle. Indignant artists and connoisseurs complained to Clarac, and he agreed with them. Hadn’t the famous Venus of Knidos, the masterpiece of Praxiteles, been displayed in its temple so she could be seen all around?