Gregory Curtis

by Disarmed: The Story of the Venus De Milo

  Over time, however, Delacroix changed his opinion of Jean-Gaspard-Félix Ravaisson. He continued to encounter him here and there in Paris and came to admire his “intelligent zeal” and to support various artistic causes that Ravaisson initiated. This pattern of response to the man—boredom and rejection, followed eventually by appreciation and respect—occurred again and again throughout Ravaisson’s lifetime. It damaged his career and forced him into years of oblivion before he finally achieved prominence. Although banished from teaching philosophy during an era when philosophical studies were the foundation of a liberal education, Ravaisson eventually became one of the most influential French philosophers of the nineteenth century. And though he was neither an archeologist nor a historian by training, it was Ravaisson who at last determined what had really happened to the Venus de Milo while it was kept secluded in the back workshop in the Louvre.

  The sealed room

  FÉLIX Ravaisson became conservator of antiquities and sculpture at the Louvre in June 1870. He was appointed by the government of Napoleon III, who was then in the last days of his reign. The emperor had foolishly provoked a war with Prussia. Before the end of August he would be utterly defeated and locked in a Prussian prison while enemy troops streamed across France to besiege Paris.

  Ravaisson was fifty-seven and had spent the past thirty-five years in one government job after another concerning arts or education. At the same time he maintained a separate reputation as a critic and thinker. He had just published a tome on nineteenth-century French philosophy. Reflective and ethereal by nature, with no experience in administration, Ravaisson was plunged immediately into weeks of intense activity at the museum.

  The French government assumed that if the Germans captured Paris, they would plunder the Louvre and take whatever works they pleased to Germany just as the French armies under Napoleon had plundered art. Before the foreign troops could arrive, paintings by Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Rembrandt, and other great masters were rolled up, carefully packed, and sent to Brest on the northwestern coast, from where they could be shipped on to safety in England if necessary. Marble statues presented a more difficult problem because of their size, weight, and fragility. Instead of being evacuated, they were moved into a hallway in the Louvre where the windows were filled with sandbags to protect against artillery shells. The Venus de Milo, however, required more elaborate precautions, since it was a prize the Germans had always coveted.

  Félix Ravaisson, photograph by Pierre Petit (illustration credit 4.1)

  Félix Ravaisson, in one of his first official acts, had the Venus de Milo packed in a stout oak crate in which interior supports and considerable padding kept the statue immobile. In the dead of night a crew of trustworthy men took the crate to a secret door of the museum where another crew, who were ignorant of what they were hauling, carried it to a building used by the prefect of police.

  The basement of this building was a labyrinth of thick walls. Ravaisson had the crate placed at the end of a dark corridor and there constructed a wall that sealed the crate into a secret cubicle. This wall was scraped, nicked, and smeared with dirt to make it look old. Then Ravaisson had a mass of documents, just sensitive enough to make it plausible that they would be hidden, stacked in front of the new wall. A second new wall was built in front of the documents, and that wall too was scraped, nicked, and dirtied. The hope was that any search party that broke through the near wall would assume the documents were the only hidden treasure and not press farther. All this left the Venus de Milo standing in a sealed niche, a faint echo of the sealed niche on Melos where the statue had been discovered fifty years earlier.

  The Prussian army arrived outside Paris and began a siege that lasted from September 1870 to February 1871. During those five months the only means of escape was by hot-air balloon. As the siege went on, Parisians were reduced to eating rats—when they could find them. The siege ended only when the provisional government created after Napoleon III’s capture signed a humiliating peace treaty with the Prussians. When the new French government moved from Paris to Versailles, the Commune—a loose confederation of extremists, including Marxists, aging Jacobites, anti-clerics, and people from myriad fringe groups—seized control of Paris and brought on civil war. Then, as the government at Versailles tried to recapture Paris, the Commune set fires around the center of the city. The Tuileries palace was burned so badly it had to be razed. The Louvre, the Palais-Royal, and the Palais de Justice survived, although they did suffer damage. And the Commune burned the building where Ravaisson had hidden the Venus de Milo. He and the few others who knew the statue’s location assumed, glumly, that it had been damaged or even destroyed.

  When the Versailles government retook Paris in May 1871, horrifying reprisals followed. Twenty thousand people were executed in only a few weeks. About the same number had died on the guillotine during the Revolution, when the Terror was at its height. But the Terror had lasted a year.

  Ravaisson endured all these events quietly and safely in his apartment on the left bank of the Seine, directly across from the Louvre. Then, in June 1871, just days after the defeat of the Commune, he led a group into the basement of the police prefecture to bring the statue, or what was left of it, back to light. Anxiously, they shoveled aside the mass of still-smoking rubbish that had fallen into the basement and discovered, to their great surprise, that the oak crate was intact. By happy accident water from a burst pipe had protected it from the flames.

  The crate was carried back to the Louvre, where Ravaisson had it opened. The statue had not suffered any permanent damage, but the stay in the basement had had some dramatic effects. The four broken pieces, two from the left hip and two from the right, which had been reattached to the statue with plaster in the Louvre workshop, had now broken off again. Evidently humidity in the basement had weakened the plaster until it gave way.

  Although the missing pieces left a huge cavity on each side of the statue, putting the four pieces back in place with new plaster appeared to be easy enough. But Ravaisson realized that these chance events had given him the opportunity to see into the interior of the statue for the first time since it had arrived at the Louvre fifty years earlier.

  Working rapidly, which was not customary with him—normally he was as languorous and dreamy as Delacroix had found him on the evening of the lecture—Ravaisson examined the statue thoroughly, thought through the implications of what he had found, and published a paper just a few weeks later. His titles are as maddeningly quiet and unassuming as he was himself. He called this work “The Venus de Milo.” In it Ravaisson proved that the way the statue had been reconstructed in the Louvre in 1821 was so wrong that it had actually changed the way the statue looked. For fifty years the jewel of the Louvre’s collections had been presented to the public in a pose that was incorrect.

  A look inside

  RAVAISSON began by answering a question that had puzzled everyone since the statue was discovered: Had the Venus de Milo originally been carved in two blocks, or had it been one block that was later sawed in two? Now, courtesy of the hole at each hip, Ravaisson could examine the interior of the statue. The carving all along the line where the two blocks met was smooth and precise, so that when the top half was placed on the bottom, the two stones touched on their carefully carved edges and fit together perfectly. That precise workmanship was proof that the statue had not originally been one block that was later carved in half. Instead, the two halves had indeed been carved separately and then united. But why?

  It was not unusual for Greek statues to be carved in several pieces, especially when the design was complex or when the statues were carved in a place where it was difficult to obtain marble. But, as Ravaisson says in his plodding, modulated prose, “it is difficult to understand, in a land where marble is easily found in large blocks, particularly the marble of Paros from which the Venus de Milo is made, why an artist such as the creator of this statue did not take the care or did not find the means to procure,
for the work that he contemplated, a piece of marble that would suffice for it.”

  A statue made of two or more pieces creates practical problems that do not arise with a statue from a single block. In an area like the Aegean, where tremors and earthquakes are common, a statue made of two blocks would not last long with one block simply placed on the other. Eventually a tremor would shake the top half off. To prevent this disaster, the Greeks inserted two metal rods, or tenons, between the parts of a statue. In the case of the Venus de Milo, there are holes dug for the tenons about three inches inside each hip. Once the two halves were erected with the tenons in place, the sculptor or his assistants poured molten lead solder down tiny canals that led into the holes with the tenons. When the lead cooled and hardened, the two pieces of the statue were welded tightly together. Peering into the statue, Ravaisson could see the holes where the tenons had been. The metal had disappeared, but there were clear traces of rust and even a few pieces of solder still clinging to the stone.

  But there are problems that come with introducing iron tenons into marble. The iron oxidizes, expands, and causes ruptures in the stone. Consequently, tenons should have been a last resort. If the sculptor of the Venus de Milo purposely chose to construct his statue in a way that required tenons, he must have been ignorant, cavalier, or, worst of all, indifferent toward his masterpiece and its preservation.

  This subtlety was important, because presumably none of the great masters of Greek sculpture would have treated his work so casually, and Ravaisson was eager to protect the supposed pedigree of the French treasure. In order to acquit the ancient sculptor of such carelessness, he proposed that the statue had originally been carved in one piece. However, an accident of some kind had broken or splintered the lower part of the statue so badly that it could no longer support the upper half. That made it necessary to carve a new lower portion modeled after the original one. This hypothesis absolved the original sculptor of the sin of indifference. Or, as Ravaisson put it, “The present lower part, although from a period not too distant from that when the statue was originally created, would be nevertheless a restoration. It would be then the restorer and not the creator of the Venus de Milo who would have fastened the original upper part to the new lower part by metal tenons.”

  It’s impossible to know whether Ravaisson’s conjecture is true or an ingenious fantasy. He adds as an aside that the lower half is not quite as well carved as the upper, an opinion that many people share and is consistent with the notion that the lower part is a restoration by a second hand. And even a casual observer can see that the marble in the lower half is not as fine as in the upper. The lower stone seems coarser and has a brownish tint that is inferior to the pale luminosity of the marble of the upper block. But none of this can prove whether the lower part is original or a slightly later renovation.

  There is, however, one piece of evidence that proves that there was at least one restoration made in ancient times. Evidently, the four pieces near the hips had first broken off not too long after the statue was created. Now that these pieces had broken off again, Ravaisson was able to examine them individually. He found that the upper piece from the right hip could not have been the same piece that had originally broken off in antiquity. It was of the same marble and the same workmanship as the rest of the draped portion of the statue, and it had been carved to fit perfectly in place. But that original piece would have had some trace of a tenon—a groove on the inside and fragments of iron and solder—as the other three pieces did. The piece Ravaisson held had no trace of a tenon whatsoever. This meant that sometime not long after the statue had been carved the tenons had been removed, perhaps to prevent further splintering. This piece from the hip was a replacement made in antiquity after the two tenons had been removed.

  That wasn’t the only renovation Ravaisson found. The others were more serious, damaging in fact, and they had occurred, as he reluctantly had to admit, in 1821 while the statue was in the workshop of the Louvre.

  The protruding edge

  WHEN THE Venus de Milo arrived at the Louvre, the four pieces from the hips were detached and needed to be remounted. The two from the right side were attached properly. But for reasons that remain unclear, the restorers at the Louvre were unable to reattach the lower section from the left hip where it should have been. The faulty readjustment made the top edge of the broken piece extend higher than the top surface of the lower block of the statue. The restorers tried to chisel the protuberance down, but they couldn’t chisel off too much without causing visible damage. The edge of the broken piece still exceeded the surface of the bottom block by several millimeters, perhaps a sixteenth of an inch. But that small lip sticking up forced a series of readjustments, each one worse for the statue than the last.

  The tiny protuberance at the left hip meant that the upper half of the statue could not be placed flush against the lower because it would then be resting on just a few thin millimeters of marble that, sooner or later, would give way under the weight of the upper half. The remedy was to place two wooden wedges about two centimeters wide and twenty-five centimeters long between the two large blocks, one wedge near each hip. That meant that the upper torso rested on the wedges rather than on the thin protuberance at the left hip. But the wedges left a gap between the upper and lower halves of the statue. To keep the gap as small as possible, the restorers made the wedge on the right slightly smaller than the one on the left and beveled both wedges so they were thinner toward the front than at the rear. The result was that the upper torso, leaning toward the front and to the right, met flush with the front edge of the lower block. That hid the line where the two large pieces of the statue met, but the cost was great. The wedges made the upper block incline more to the right front than it should.

  That’s not all. From Clarac’s paper we learn that the line where the two major blocks joined was originally horizontal. But after the restoration, the line between the two surfaces was not horizontal but at least six degrees off the horizontal, meaning the statue was out of plumb and subject, in the case of any shock, to sliding further or even falling. This imbalance came about when the old base of the statue, which was level, was placed inside a new base, which was not level. Although Ravaisson doesn’t say this, the new base must have been added in an excess of zeal to disguise the disappearance of the base with the inscription.

  Ravaisson blamed all of the faulty reconstruction—the misplaced piece at the hip with the projecting edge, the chiseling of that edge, the wooden wedges, and the irregular new base—on haste and confusion at the Louvre. This was going a little easy on his predecessors, but we can go further than Ravaisson dared. Whether the inscribed base was destroyed or simply hidden—and the fact that it has never been found despite detailed searches of the Louvre’s warehouses suggests that the base was destroyed—it was suppressed and then lied about to preserve the identity the museum wanted for the statue.

  The piece of left hip that was incorrectly restored is another matter. Reattaching it properly could not have been that difficult. And even if it was difficult for reasons we cannot know, there is no excuse for not finding the solution to the puzzle. It’s true that archeology was in its infancy and practices were acceptable then that are considered destructive today. Still, it was obvious that the piece had fit properly once and that it wasn’t fitting properly now. Ignoring that and sacrificing the integrity of the statue at the same time was simply incompetent.

  Ravaisson, however, chose to look on the bright side. He wrote that “fortunate circumstances”—that is, the humidity in the basement of the police building—had made it possible to understand the mistakes made previously and to return the statue to the “proportions and appearance that she had in the past.” He concludes, “Now not only is this thing possible, but, according to the preceding argument, it’s a simple thing, too.”

  Ravaisson may have thought the change was simple, but instead he found himself suddenly trapped where he was most uncomfortable: at the center
of a controversy. The notion of making changes to the Venus de Milo instantly attracted the attention of French officialdom. Such a decision could not be left to some conservator at the Louvre. Instead the Academy of Fine Arts was summoned to study whether to remove the wedges and restore the statue to its proper appearance or to leave the wedges in and continue to display the statue in the incorrect position it had had for fifty years. Faced with this “problem,” the Academy had two plaster casts made, one in the proper position and one in the false one, and stood them side by side against a background of green drapes.

  Théophile Gautier, an author whose prolific writings included art criticism, was a member of the Academy. He concluded that, when properly displayed, the “Venus appears younger and more slender, but she has not the graceful abandon and voluptuous languor imparted to her by the inclined pose … she is more of a goddess and less of a woman.” This extreme example of French pride contends that the renovations made by the Louvre had actually improved the statue. In the end the Academy agreed with Gautier that the wisest course was to leave the wedges in so as not to change the look of the statue and interfere with the public’s “habit of admiration.”

  Habitual passivity

  RAVAISSON acquiesced to this decision. He didn’t have the wedges removed until twelve years later, in 1883, and then only when some repairs to the antique galleries of the Louvre forced the Venus to be removed from view for a short while. At the same time he had the hideous left foot made of plaster the restorers had added in 1821 taken off. Ravaisson later tried to explain his reluctance to correct the travesty he had exposed by saying that it seemed to him necessary “to give critics time to verify the facts and to get rid of long ingrained prejudices.” In other words, he didn’t want to cause any trouble.