Gregory Curtis

by Disarmed: The Story of the Venus De Milo

  On the other hand, with the statue now on open display, the curtain of secrecy was drawn aside, and Clarac was free to study her as he wished. In a matter of weeks he published his own paper. Forbin could not pocket this work as he had Clarac’s earlier paper for the king. And, as Forbin suspected, Clarac was a renegade. Without mentioning Quatremère by name, he disagreed with the scholar’s most important conclusions and rejected the Louvre’s orthodoxy about the statue, which Quatremère’s paper had defined.

  Or, to be precise, he rejected almost all of it. He begins by mentioning the Elgin marbles in England. They “represent an epoch in the history of art,” but the Louvre’s statue “that recalls to a great degree all their diverse beauty” creates an epoch, too, and one not less important. In fact, he concludes, many think it is an even finer work.

  After this nod to French pride, Clarac begins his attack. He criticizes the placement of the statue in the Salle de Diane. Then, facing off directly with Quatremère, he insists that the statue could not be part of a group—“If it is part of a group, why is there no trace of Mars?” Furthermore, the inscribed base did belong to the statue. It was exactly the right size, and the fracture lines at the back and the sides fit precisely. It was not there by chance but was an integral part of the statue. The sculptor was neither Phidias nor Praxiteles, as much as he would like to say it was. Then he gets in a nice little dig. Those who claim it was by Praxiteles seem to be “so familiar with his style that one would be led to believe that they had seen him work.” No, the statue was by Alexandros of Antioch, just as the broken base said. The inscription could not be a forgery, because forgers would have carved a name that would have added value, while this is not a famous name. But what difference does that make? The Apollo Belvedere was the work of an unknown sculptor, too. No, in his opinion it is a bad mistake to display the statue without the inscribed base.

  Clarac called his paper “On the antique statue of Venus Victrix, with a drawing by Debay the younger.” And there on the cover of the pamphlet was Debay’s drawing. The fragment of left arm was attached at the shoulder and stuck straight out parallel to the ground. And against the left side of the statue’s base, fitting perfectly against the jagged edge, was the broken base with the inscription. The Greek letters were clearly legible. Discord had thrown an apple into the party at the Louvre, although it would be almost eighty years before the trouble rose to the surface.

  The statue comes to the king

  FORBIN, however, does not seem to have borne a grudge. On June 24, just a few days after Clarac’s paper had appeared, Forbin wrote a letter to him about his criticism of the placement of the statue in the Salle de Diane. “I find your ideas very wise,” Forbin said, “but if you knew all that stops me, you would approve of the moderation by which I buy peace. However, the statue from Melos will be placed soon in a more favorable setting and with a little patience everything will work out.”

  Forbin needed to be forgiving, since he had other problems now and he would need Clarac’s help; but he could afford to be forgiving as well. He had won, after all. The radiance of Quatremère’s paper put Clarac’s in shadow. The statue was established as a Venus from the hand, or at least from the school, of either Phidias or Praxiteles. It had filled the tremendous gap left by the return of the Apollo Belvedere to the Vatican and stood as a prize equal to or perhaps even better than the Elgin marbles.

  Despite his frosty treatment of Clarac while the statue was in the back workshop, Forbin seems to have been generous by nature. Even his feuds over women, like the one that led to the duel with Constant, were one-sided, born from the frustrations of rivals jealous of Forbin’s good looks and charm. Although he had his favored friends among the artists of the day—Granet, of course, Ingres, and a number of others—he was surprisingly free from the vengeful politics that infest the arts in every time and place. The letters he wrote to Granet are filled with his efforts on behalf of many artists. He was virtually their business agent. He was neither doctrinaire in his taste nor snobbish about class. Granet, after all, was the son of a bricklayer.

  There were two exceptions to Forbin’s general amiability. One was his miserly mother-in-law. The other was Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine, now sixty years old and by appointment the official architect of Paris, architect to the king, architect to the duc d’Orléans, and architect of the Louvre.

  Since Fontaine lived to be ninety-one and worked incessantly, France is covered with buildings he designed or restored. In Paris those include the Palais Royal, the Théâtre Français, the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, and many parts of the Louvre itself. He, like Clarac and Quatremère, never married but had a long personal and artistic association with a fellow architect, Charles Percier, who decorated the interiors of Fontaine’s buildings. In fact, as young men Fontaine and Percier made a pact never to marry. Fontaine adopted a daughter, raised her, and, after her marriage, customarily spent evenings with her family. His daily routine never varied. He was at work every morning at five. In the afternoon he visited construction sites and did other necessary business. He dined at six and went to bed at ten.

  With most people he was dry, remote, and imperious, although generally not unkind. An artist who had suffered a reversal of fortune once called on him at his office. The artist stammered a few words before Fontaine, understanding what he wanted, cut him off. “I am very busy,” he said. “My bureau is in the neighboring room. Here is the key. Do me the courtesy of taking the sum you need, which I do not need to know, and allow me to finish my work.” When the artist returned months later to repay the debt and thank Fontaine, the architect again cut him off and said, “I am very busy. Here is my key. Take it, lock up this money, and allow me to finish my work.”

  Fontaine could not be intimidated or easily moved against his will. He once contradicted Napoleon to his face and refused to carry out a restoration the emperor had just ordered. Napoleon turned and left the room. For three hours Fontaine waited until Napoleon returned and relented.

  When Forbin mentioned in his letter to Clarac “the moderation by which I buy peace,” he was referring to peace with Fontaine. This peace was difficult, if not impossible, to maintain, because Fontaine opposed Forbin’s ideas simply because they came from Forbin. “The continual buzzing of this skinny administrator is unbearable,” Fontaine wrote in his journal. “Always driven by the heat of an ardent ambition, troubled by the consciousness of an incapacity that is difficult to hide, meddling in everything, not accomplishing anything, how many times he has worn us out by his importuning and frustrating presence!”

  Since the king himself appointed the architect of the Louvre, the architect wasn’t answerable to the director of the museum. Consequently, Forbin had no authority over Fontaine, nor Fontaine over Forbin. In the case of the statue, Forbin as director had the power to determine where the statue should be displayed. Fontaine as architect had the responsibility for moving it and for designing and creating the display. The only way to resolve a dispute between them was for the two men to try to outmaneuver each other.

  Fontaine thought the Venus should be displayed in the Rotonde d’Apollon, a round room on the second floor at the top of the grand staircase by which the Winged Victory stands today. Forbin knew he had made a mistake putting the statue in the Salle de Diane, but he didn’t want it in the Rotonde d’Apollon either. He thought it should remain on the ground floor near the rest of the Greek and Roman antiquities. In August 1821 Forbin requested that both Clarac and Fontaine make preparations for the move. Fontaine ignored him, stalling. This went on for months until in late October Fontaine conceived of a brilliant strategy for having the statue placed in the Rotonde d’Apollon after all.

  The statue belonged to the king, but he had never seen it. In fact, it was difficult to know how he ever could. He was so fat that he couldn’t walk and spent all his time in a wheelchair. He lived on the second floor of the Tuileries Palace, which did connect with the second floor of the Louvre, but the statue w
as on the first floor. The only way to move the king from the second floor to the first would be to lower him like a piano with a crane. The king wouldn’t submit to such indignity, even to see his famous treasure.

  Fontaine’s inspiration was to realize that if the king couldn’t come to the statue, the statue could come to the king. Each year in January Louis made a ceremonial visit to the opening of the chamber of deputies. As a courtesy to him, the deputies held that session in the Salle Lacaze on the second floor of the Louvre in the southwest corner of the Cour Carrée. Meeting there made it possible to wheel the king over from the palace. The Rotonde d’Apollon was just a short distance from the doorway to the Salle Lacaze. On his way to the meeting, the king would have to pass right through it.

  The minister of the Maison du Roi, a baron and general named Lauriston, controlled the property of the king and was the immediate superior of both Fontaine and Forbin. Innocently, as if the good of the king were his only interest, Fontaine proposed to Lauriston that the statue from Melos be displayed in the Rotonde d’Apollon. There at last, while on his way to open the chamber of deputies, the king could see his precious possession. Forbin must have understood Fontaine’s real intent, but he could hardly disagree. To do so would have appeared disloyal, since the plan was so clearly to the king’s advantage.

  The statue was moved upstairs from the Salle de Diane and installed in the Rotonde d’Apollon. In January 1822, Louis XVIII stopped his wheelchair in front of the statue on his way to the opening of the chamber of deputies. Unfortunately, there is no record of who was present on this occasion or what was said. Afterward, the king rolled on to the Salle Lacaze and performed his official duties. Then he rolled back through the Rotonde d’Apollon and down the whole length of the Louvre to the Tuileries palace. The Venus de Milo remained standing in the Rotonde d’Apollon, precisely where Fontaine had wanted it all along.

  Of course that was precisely where Forbin did not want it. He still believed it should be displayed in the galleries on the ground floor. Clarac supported him. The two men had mended their differences, addressing each other now as “cher ami.” Perhaps Clarac supported Forbin because his plan would put the statue with the other Greek and Roman antiquities and thus under Clarac’s jurisdiction.

  But Clarac might have supported Forbin because he was right. It seems obvious now, accustomed as we are to museums organized by periods in art history, with the works in each period organized roughly chronologically, that there should be some order to the way works are displayed in a museum, especially one as large and varied as the Louvre. But that wasn’t obvious in the early nineteenth century. Denon put some order in his displays, and now Forbin wanted to impose an even stricter order.

  He wanted the Louvre to be a tool for learning by artists, connoisseurs, and anyone else who was interested. He wrote that the purpose of the museum was to be “a place consecrated to arts and to study.” Forbin jealously guarded his authority over the arrangement of artworks because without it he could not transform the Louvre into the kind of museum he wanted it to be. He had forcefully, even arrogantly, reminded Clarac of his power in the letter he wrote during their quarrel. Now the greatest threat to that authority was Fontaine.

  With the Venus de Milo in the Rotonde d’Apollon, Forbin couldn’t afford any further delays. The longer the statue remained there, the more it would seem to belong in that spot. In February 1822 he decided it should go into the Salle de Tibre, in the southwest corner of the Cour Carrée on the ground floor.

  Forbin’s decision sent Fontaine into a rage. Why take the trouble and why risk the danger of moving the statue again? He called the idea a “turbulent uselessness” that was nothing more than one of Forbin’s “capricious fantasies.” He had had enough of this man’s stupidities! The two men argued loudly and publicly. They were often on the verge of coming to blows.

  Fontaine insisted on having a plaster cast made in order to see how the statue would look in the Salle de Tibre. He thought the response to the cast proved him right, but Forbin was unmoved. Then, desperate to circumvent Forbin, Fontaine suggested that a jury of knowledgeable artists, including both Forbin and himself, be formed in order to decide whether the statue should remain in the Rotonde d’Apollon or be moved to the Salle de Tibre. Forbin couldn’t abide this threat to his authority. He now turned to Lauriston, the minister of the Maison du Roi, who this time sided with him. On April 14, Forbin wrote to Fontaine, “I have the honor to advise you that my orders having been given and my measures taken for the displacement of the Venus de Milo and its replacement [in the Salle de Tibre], I would like the transport of this figure to be accomplished by Tuesday the sixteenth of this month.”

  Still Fontaine did nothing. Incensed, Forbin wrote him a letter the next day that began, “I am truly displeased that you would force me to repeat to you for the tenth time that I have received the orders of the Minister for the placement of the statue from Melos.” Fontaine at last had the statue moved on April 23, 1822. Still furious, that night he made a long, unrepentant entry in his journal: “It was only the personal interest, the ambition, the wounded vanity, and the ardor of a hypocritical zeal that motivated Monsieur le comte and caused the whole affaire.”

  But Monsieur le comte was right. The Venus de Milo remained where Forbin placed her for more than twenty-five years. Then, during the revolution of 1848, she was moved to the opposite end of the hallway—still among the Greek and Roman antiquities, still on the first floor—and placed in an alcove (behind the room where she stands today). She stayed there until 1870, when another violent social upheaval forced her removal from the museum for safekeeping. That move would reveal that this Venus, apparently solid rock, in fact held secrets deep within.

  A cavalier in a corset

  BUT A different generation, one that had just been born in 1822, would discover those secrets. As for the generation of adventurers and collectors who had found the statue and acquired it for France, two came to sad ends.

  Dumont d’Urville achieved all his dreams. He became an admiral and explorer whose books spread his fame throughout Europe. The French claim with justification that he was the equal of Captain Cook. In 1842 he was living in Paris with his wife and his son Jules (their three other children had all died). On May 8 they took a train to Versailles for a festival. During the trip back the train, which had two engines, began speeding in order to keep to a contracted schedule. The engines went out of control, jumped the track, and burst into flame. The wooden passenger cars behind them, whose doors had been locked for some reason, ran up over the burning engines and trapped the passengers, including d’Urville and his family, in an inferno. Two days later coroners identified his wife’s remains by a necklace she was wearing. Some charred bones apparently of a child were assumed to be Jules. A phrenologist who had measured d’Urville’s head was able to identify his skull. His monument in Condé-sur-Noireau describes him as the discoverer of the Venus de Milo. A bas-relief, comically inept and inaccurate, shows the moment of his great “discovery.”

  Despite his efforts for the Louvre, Forbin’s paintings never received serious recognition. During his final years he lived with the gloomy belief that he had failed. He continued in his position at the Louvre and kept working on behalf of his friends. He even continued to paint, but he himself knew that his skills had declined. He clung instead to appearances. He became obsessed with trying to preserve himself as the handsome, witty cavalier he had once really been. He took to wearing a tight corset to give his body the form it had had when he was young. In 1827, only six years after the arrival of the statue, he had a stroke. His doctor strictly forbade him to wear the corset any longer. But he did, lacing it even tighter. Enamored of Madame de Castellane, a woman well into her fifties who still attracted lovers, he took to using Spanish fly, hoping to restore his sexual prowess. That brought on another stroke in 1828.

  Rumors circulated around Paris that Forbin had gone mad. He hadn’t, but he was no longer the same man. He s
tayed in his post at the Louvre, although he was now powerless and ineffective. He still attended salons, particularly that of Madame Récamier, the woman he had once dueled over, until his death in 1841. Her servants would carry him up her staircase. He looked like a ghastly phantom, but he smiled and saluted the room gallantly. She reawakened the spirit in him, made it worthwhile to attempt a quip or two. When he was rewarded with a smile or laugh, he would say, “That is the real Forbin.”

  IV

  Broken Marble

  ON A TUESDAY evening in May 1853 the romantic painter Eugène Delacroix attended a lecture at the Louvre. He described the event as a “big reunion of artists, of semi-artists, of priests, and of women.” The speaker, “a certain Ravaisson,” as Delacroix wrote in his journal, turned out to be a man of forty with luminous blue eyes, a sad, sagging face, and an air that was both passive and distracted.

  Ravaisson was late beginning his lecture, which annoyed Delacroix, and when he did speak at last, it was in a soft, dry voice that was difficult to hear. Ravaisson talked on and on without pause and with no inflection whatsoever. The lecture’s main theme, so far as Delacroix could tell, was to link Christianity to the art of classical Greece. Ravaisson, droning on, repeatedly cited Aristotle as an authority. He quoted Greek in the same inaudible monotone he used for speaking French.

  Vexed and bored, Delacroix followed the example of several others and ducked out after hearing only half the lecture. Outside the Louvre he reveled in “the magnificent weather and the fact that I could move my legs in freedom, after the captivity I had just endured.”