Gregory Curtis

by Disarmed: The Story of the Venus De Milo

  At Olympia Furtwängler also described the strata of the site in detail. That in turn allowed him to date the finds according to the level where they were found. Then, combining that information with methods of dating as he had done with the pottery from Mycenae, he was able to arrange the 7,500 bronze artifacts into groups and then arrange the groups chronologically. His methods for dating Greek bronzes remain the standard.

  This was a tremendously important moment, not just in Furtwängler’s career but in the history of archeology. Furtwängler was not working with texts, so he had made a break with philology. He was working with artifacts, but these artifacts were not isolated objects of great beauty like the Elgin marbles or the Venus de Milo. Instead they were thousands upon thousands of undistinguished, often unlovely objects he had not chosen and didn’t necessarily like. Faced with this overwhelming flood of things, Furtwängler developed methods of grouping them, comparing them, dating them, and then drawing conclusions from them. Some precedents existed, and there were others involved in a similar process of discovery, but Furtwängler played an important part in the invention of modern archeology. He created a philology based on objects rather than words.

  In 1879 Furtwängler left Olympia for Berlin, where there were two collections of Greek and Roman antiquities. But the director of the collections so despised the young man’s arrogance—Furtwängler was twenty-six—that Ernst Curtius took him in at the Antiquarium, where he was director. Furtwängler, who attributed his troubles to anti-Catholic bias, immediately began cataloging more than four thousand disparate items in the Berlin collections, describing each one in painful detail. He also cataloged the Antiquarium’s collection of twelve thousand engraved stones, gems, and cameos.

  Here again he found this tedious work congenial. “I am already in the museum at half past eight,” he wrote to a friend, “and working hard on vases. It is pleasant to be able to work undisturbed on such great material. I have three servants at my disposal who obey all my orders.”

  But even these monumental tasks absorbed only a fraction of his boundless energy. He published a torrent of papers and articles. He feuded constantly and was often vicious in his printed remarks about scholars with whom he disagreed. He called one a “complete ignoramus.” He relished swooping down uninvited and unwanted on some museum’s prized artifact and declaring it a fake, particularly if the museum was French. And yet Furtwängler could not endure being attacked in the kind of brutal phrases he himself used habitually. It hurt and bewildered him. “One of my fundamental failings,” he once remarked, “is my constant readiness to believe that another is hostile to me or despises me.”

  In 1886 Furtwängler met Adelheid Wendt, whose father was the headmaster of a gymnasium just as Furtwängler’s had been. A gymnasium was a secondary school for boys. These schools had been established across Germany early in the 1800s in order to wrest control of education away from the Catholic Church. German civilization at the time was so enthralled by classical antiquity that the students took Greek and Latin, studied classical writers, and learned little else. The intention was to teach the boys not how to do anything but how to be something. The gymnasiums were prestigious because only their graduates could enter universities, and a university degree was the only path to careers in the state bureaucracy or the professions. The headmasters made a good living and had a highly respectable social position.

  Brash and quick-minded in all things, Furtwängler proposed to Adelheid the night they met. She objected that it was too sudden. He agreed, so they waited until the next night to announce their engagement. She had some sort of birth defect on the right side of her face—even casual family photographs always show her in left profile—and grew up slightly wounded, since both her sisters were considered beauties.

  Adelheid was typical of the shy but benevolent women who marry interesting but self-absorbed men, and the couple seems to have been very content. Furtwängler liked rural areas more than cities. In Berlin and later in Munich they lived in pretty countryside near the edge of town. He was a tall, lithe, handsome man with bushy hair and a swashbuckling mustache who adored physical activity. Life with him was almost a self-parody of constant hiking, sailing, and swimming. His idea of the ideal existence was to be an English gentleman living in the country and riding to hounds. He even sprinkled his speech with Anglicisms.

  By the time he was at the Archeological Institute in Berlin, Furtwängler could afford books, a fine house, and travel. Archeology had become a mighty force in Germany. There were museums of antiquities that had an important role in the cultural life of German cities, and in the universities the classical departments attracted eager students. Furtwängler’s father had raised him to believe that a true modern hero was one who devoted his life to the Greeks and Romans, and that was exactly what Furtwängler had chosen to do.

  And apparently all Germany felt the same way. Furtwängler’s lectures became so popular that seats had to be reserved in advance. Too busy to prepare, he spoke extemporaneously. His voice was thin, and his bushy hair became a distraction as it shook with his exertions. But he spoke beautiful German with precise diction as hard-won knowledge and brilliant ideas flowed out of him like a river. As one student said, “The influence that radiated from him was overwhelming, because he always spoke from the abundance of his own experiences and his own work, with its continually new perceptions and discoveries, and because his enthusiasm was genuine.” Furtwängler had no time for students who didn’t rise to his standards, but he was fond of those who did and treated them with respect. He welcomed and encouraged women and allowed them to read for a doctorate even though the German universities did not formally admit them.

  In Berlin he wrote his great work Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture, which contained his long essay on the Venus de Milo. Yet, comfortable and well situated as he was, when Kekule von Stradonitz, a virulent opponent, was appointed to a post in Berlin that Furtwängler coveted, his wounded pride caused him to leave for Munich, where he lived for the rest of his life.

  He and Adelheid had four children, two boys and then two girls. Wilhelm, the older boy, born in 1886, was a musical genius. As a conductor he was one of the foremost interpreters of Beethoven and Wagner in the twentieth century. During the Nazi years he continued to conduct in Berlin for audiences that included Hitler, though Wilhelm was not a party member or even in sympathy with Nazism. After the war he was formally exonerated of complicity. Nevertheless, public sentiment didn’t agree, and in 1949 hostile protests caused his appointment as conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to be canceled.

  The island

  THE ONLY contemporary archeologist who approached Adolf Furtwängler in stature was French. Salomon Reinach and he were united by their intellects and their passion for classical antiquity. Otherwise they were opposites who, disagreeing about almost everything, disagreed most about the Venus de Milo. While Adolf Furtwängler loved his wife and children and his family remained close all their lives, the Venus de Milo was the only woman Salomon Reinach ever understood, and he may not have understood her.

  Reinach had become famous as a genius when he was still in secondary school. Salomon and his two brothers—Joseph, the oldest of the three, and Théodore, the youngest—won so many scholastic prizes that their accomplishments were heralded in the national press. In fact, the brothers were not awarded all the prizes they deserved, because they were Jews; their total domination would have caused political trouble. Later, when Joseph and Théodore were in the Chamber of Deputies and Salomon was a famous scholar, a cabaret singer in Montmartre christened them the “Know-it-all Brothers,” which may have been an anti-Semitic jibe.

  Their father, a brilliant commercial trader who moved first from Germany to Switzerland and from there to Paris, possessed one of the five or six largest fortunes in France. Despite their wealth, the three brothers all chose to work hard in careers that combined public service and scholarship. Salomon worked hardest of all. He wrote so much that his
bibliography runs to 262 pages, including more than ninety lengthy works and at least seven thousand articles. But this list is certainly incomplete, because he often published his articles unsigned or under a variety of pseudonyms.

  Salomon Reinach, photograph by Roger Viollet (illustration credit 5.2)

  The sheer volume of his writings is staggering, but so is the breadth of his subject matter. In addition to detailed, lifelong work on the archeology of the Mediterranean and several hundred pages on the Venus de Milo, he wrote a history of religion and a history of art that were reprinted in edition after edition in both French and English. He wrote French, Greek, and Latin grammars as well as histories of Renaissance art, the Spanish Inquisition, and the trials of Joan of Arc. He wrote a history of the Celts. He translated the German philosopher Schopenhauer into French. He wrote a manual of philology, a study of Albrecht Dürer, a treatise on the way galloping horses were represented in art, and a tome called Cults, Myths, and Religions that is well over a thousand pages and influenced Freud while he was writing Totem and Taboo.

  This almost inconceivably vast output left little time for much else, and his obituary in the Revue Archéologique says that he knew nothing of the pleasures of life, had little taste for society, and preferred to work. That assessment seems rather dour, since others’ recollections make it clear that he enjoyed interesting people and was very good company himself. He visited friends such as the Rothschilds and others at the top of Jewish society, and he was welcomed at the best intellectual and artistic salons of the era. Although he was diabetic and often appeared pasty and overweight from the disease, was a heavy smoker who developed a persistent cough, and easily became excited, which caused him to stammer, he was known—and liked—for launching into dizzying monologues that leapt from topic to topic in a display that was part erudition, part shrewd perception, and part playfulness. His charm was that it became impossible to know which was which. He once insisted to the art critic and historian Bernard Berenson that it was an important scholarly challenge to establish the exact moment in history when the back of a woman’s neck came to be recognized in art and literature.

  This was only a spur-of-the-moment improvisation, but the subject is revealing. Reinach had the fetishist’s obsession with the parts of a woman’s body as well as with their representations. He once wrote a paper proposing a method of dating Greek statues of women based on the variations in the distance between their breasts. But he also had the fetishist’s confusion when confronted with the woman’s body in the flesh. Liane de Pougy, a beautiful former courtesan and actress who occupied much of Salomon’s time and imagination during the last decade of his life, once lifted her dress while in a feline mood to show him a scar on her thigh. This sort of thing was how she had made her living when she was young, so she knew the effect it would have. Reinach was confused, tormented, attracted, repelled. She later remarked, “It’s said that the only nakedness he has ever seen is that of statues.”

  This observation may not have been literally true, but it was accurate in its way. Reinach tried to conceal his fears and confusion by adopting a pretentious courtly manner with women. He made a display of elaborately kissing their hands. Afterward, given the slightest chance, he liked to play the role of an all-knowing instructor to women, particularly if they were young and pretty. He once pulled Bernard Berenson’s wife aside with an air of mystery and said to her, “Tell me then, these things that your husband has written, are they things you believe one could explain to young girls?” He even wrote a series of instructional manuals, each of which was addressed to a teenaged girl: Eulalie or Greek Without Tears, Cornelie or Latin Without Tears, Sidonie or French Without Pain, and Letters to Zoe on the History of Philosophies (in three volumes!). Although Reinach could lecture charmingly in person or in print—Eulalie, Cornelie, Sidonie, and Letters to Zoe all sold so well that new printings were constantly in demand; in fact, except for Zoe, they are still in print—this social strategy preserved a professorial distance between him and women. Berenson, who saw what Reinach was doing to himself and how it made him unhappy and even ridiculous, said in a letter to a friend, “Much more romance, and yearnings, and even passion hides behind his pedantries than many a professed ladies’ man has ever known.”

  Reinach did have a wife. In 1891, when he was thirty-three, he married a woman named Rose Morgoulieff, whose family had fled Russia. She had a life of her own as a doctor who directed a hospital for unwed mothers. She worked so selflessly for the hospital and its patients that she was awarded the Legion of Honor. Although she was proper, solemn, and admirable, she seems to have been entirely out of her husband’s erotic range, whatever its exact nature may have been. They had no children. The reason—or the excuse—was that he had been influenced by the theories of Malthus and worried about overpopulation. But some connection existed between them. They were married for forty-two years. He donated massive sums to Jewish causes in Russia because of her. Just weeks after he died, in his own home in 1932, Rose too passed away.

  There were, however, three women whom we know he deeply loved. They all shared two characteristics: a taste for literary artiness and a passionate lesbianism. In 1914 he became obsessed by the poet Pauline Tarn. She was an English-American woman who wrote in French under the name Renée Vivien. Five years earlier, she had died of alcoholism and anorexia at the age of thirty. Love between women is the principal theme of her poetry. After reading all of her work—nine volumes of poetry, including translations of Sappho and variations on some of Sappho’s poems, a novel, and two volumes of prose—Reinach became convinced that Pauline Tarn had been a genius. He began placing letters in literary journals in England and France asking for information about her, and he made diligent, if not annoying, inquiries among people who might have known her while she lived in Paris.

  Pauline’s first great love, a Parisian girl named Violet Shilleto, had died when Pauline was twenty. After that, living on an inheritance from her deceased father, Pauline had wandered the world aimlessly with a succession of lovers or lived alone in a shuttered room in Paris. Her sad life, her love for Greek culture, her sexuality, even her recourse to a pseudonym all fascinated Reinach. He placed the material he gathered—reminiscences, letters, and so on—into files left in a library in Aix-en-Provence that were to be sealed until the year 2000. To those friends who found this obsession just the least bit odd, he replied that if someone had preserved similar material about Sappho after her death, wouldn’t we be thankful today?

  One day a friend took an excited Salomon Reinach to meet Natalie Clifford Barney. Although she came from Cincinnati, where her father had made a fortune manufacturing railroad cars, Natalie Barney had attended school in Paris and lived there most of her life. Known for her beautiful, slightly archaic French, she was a voluptuous, charismatic woman, a writer, and the hostess each Friday afternoon of a salon at her house at 20 Rue Jacob. Everyone important in arts or literature went there, including Auguste Rodin, Colette, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Anatole France, Count Robert de Montesquiou (on whom Proust patterned Baron Charlus), Isadora Duncan, Ezra Pound, Max Jacob, Jean Cocteau, and many others.

  But for Reinach all that paled beside one fact: Natalie had had an intense love affair with Pauline Tarn. That, together with Natalie’s powerful physical presence and formidable personality, overwhelmed Reinach. He arrived at her house on the Rue Jacob in love with one unattainable woman, the dead poet. When he left, he was in love with another.

  “She reads nothing, knows nothing, intuits everything, this wild girl from Cincinnati,” he said of her. When she was young, she had a huge mane of blond hair that fell in waves well below her shoulders and a full, athletic figure that exuded sexuality. She had never been interested in men, although she attracted many suitors. Instead she became a predatory seductress of women, often arriving to court them dressed as a page. She liked to pose for photographs kissing another woman or reclining completely nude in a forest. Now, in 1914, she was thirty-eigh
t to Reinach’s fifty-six and had begun to appear blocky and mannish. But her eyes were still radiantly blue, her manner was free and enthusiastic, and she had a pointed wit. What excited Reinach most of all was that she was an open, unapologetic lesbian.

  Reinach saw her often. At a party at his house he introduced her to Bernard Berenson, saying, “Surely the wild girl from Cincinnati and the sauvage du Danube were meant to meet!” Berenson fell for her too, attracted by what he called her “physical radiance.” And Natalie, who indulged and teased Reinach more than she really liked him, was taken with Berenson. “I was madly in love with you,” she told him, “until I suddenly woke to the realization that you were a male.”

  When he was with Natalie Barney, Reinach constantly tried to turn the conversation to her sex life. He called lesbianism “the island,” and he could never seem to get enough of the details. Years earlier, when she was just twenty-one, Natalie had seen a radiantly beautiful woman, just a few years older than her, riding in an open carriage in the Bois de Boulogne. Natalie learned who she was, began sending flowers and gifts, and came to call in her page’s costume. Without too much difficulty the woman succumbed; afterward, she wrote a barely disguised novel about the affair called l’Idylle Saphique, which was a scandalous success when it was published in 1901. Natalie, whose character in the novel is named Flossie, told Reinach about the book, and he, of course, devoured it.

  But even its explicitness did not satisfy his curiosity. He wanted to know still more. He wanted to meet the author, Natalie’s former and still occasional lover. He pressed Natalie until at last, in 1918, just after the war ended, she took him to the Majestic Hotel in Paris to meet Liane de Pougy. She too had known Pauline Tarn, and as Natalie’s lover she knew the most intimate details of life on “the island.” Reinach could not resist her. She became the third of his great unattainable loves.