Gregory Curtis

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by Disarmed: The Story of the Venus De Milo


  The patience of a saint

  FURTWÄNGLER did not meekly submit to this trouncing. In a paper he wrote for the Academy of Bavaria in 1902, he came roaring back full of assurance and contemptuous of anyone who would question him. And now that Reinach had had his day, there was new information that supported Furtwängler’s theories.

  In 1900 and again in 1902 the French scholar Etienne Michon, adjunct conservator of antiquities at the Louvre, published articles in the Revue des Etudes Grecques that were the result of many months of diligent research in maritime records, Louvre archives, published memoirs, and private family papers concerning the discovery of the Venus de Milo and its transportation to the Louvre. In the course of these researches he discovered information about the purchase of a statue of Hermes, signed by a sculptor named Antiphanes, found on Melos in 1827. The statue came from one of three niches in an ancient wall. The first was the one in which the Venus had been discovered; at its entrance an inscription said that a man named Bakkhios had dedicated the niche to Hermes and Hercules. The second niche, about twenty paces away, contained the statue of Hermes signed by Antiphanes. In the third niche, another twenty paces down the wall, only the feet remained of the statue that once stood there, but an inscription revealed that it had been a statue of a man named Hagesimenes, whose father and brother had dedicated the niche to Hermes and Hercules.

  These two gods were the patrons of gymnasiums. According to Furtwängler, their ubiquitous presence made it clear that this had once been the wall of a gymnasium, and that the Venus de Milo had been displayed in her niche as part of the decorations. Thus, he concludes in triumph, she had been found in situ, as he had maintained from the start, and not in a limekiln, as Reinach continued to believe.

  The fact that the bearded herm fit in the newly rediscovered base didn’t impress Furtwängler at all. “These two little herms,” he said, “simple offerings to the god of the gymnasium, derive from an époque older than the gymnasium of Melos. Later, when the niches had been constructed and provided with large statues from the second to the first centuries B.C., the herms were employed as decoration of the niche dedicated by Bakkhios.” And he continued to insist that Voutier had put one of the herms in the base with the signature where it didn’t belong. That base, Furtwängler still defiantly believed, belonged to the statue and gave the name of its sculptor and, because of the reference to Antioch, its true date.

  Salomon Reinach took all this as a direct, personal affront. He could hardly control his rage. “I admit,” he wrote in a paper he published in response a few months later, “that I sometimes have trouble arguing coolly with Mr. Furtwängler. Even when he is wrong, he has a passion to be always right that would put the patience of a saint to a harsh test. That said, I am going to be very objective.” Reinach, it’s fair to say, failed to achieve this goal.

  Furtwängler now dated the bearded herm with the Theodoridas inscription to the end of the fifth century B.C. Reinach wrote, “He was previously content to say that it was ‘older than the Empire’; I am the one who determined the date.” Furtwängler now put the two herms in different eras. Reinach retaliated: “He thought formerly that the two herms were contemporary; I am the one who corrected him.” And when Furtwängler repeated his belief in his reconstruction with Venus resting her left forearm on a pillar (“Of which,” Reinach added in a parenthesis, “no one has found the slightest fragment!”), Reinach smugly added a footnote: “Mr. Furtwängler, however, must know that I have demonstrated the impossibility of this tendentious restitution.” But he could not stop there: “What a shame that the tribunal in The Hague does not settle scientific disputes! I would readily agree to a meeting before judges, who wouldn’t be archeologists but rule by the simple lights of common sense and by what is most likely. He would be given a grueling time.”

  With all that out of his system, Reinach then calmly explained the crux of their differences. They agreed that the statue of Poseidon was Hellenistic, which means it dated from the first or second century B.C. Furtwängler thought the Venus came from the same period but that the Poseidon had no relation to it. For him, they were two separate works. Reinach thought that the Venus was really an Amphitrite from the Greek classical period, the fourth century B.C., and was part of a group with the Poseidon.

  But then how could Reinach agree that the Poseidon was Hellenistic? By pure invention. He contended that the original Poseidon had indeed been created in the fourth century, but it had been damaged or destroyed and “replaced by a mediocre copy from the Roman era.” He had dropped his limekiln theory without a word; the three niches with statues in a row and the dedications to Hermes and Hercules were too strong proof that the location had been a gymnasium.

  Reinach concluded by saying he hoped someday to convince Furtwängler, whom, in a conciliatory spirit, he calls his “eminent friend and contradictor.” Reinach failed in this goal as well. Neither man ever retreated from his position.

  Lilacs and tulips

  INSTEAD they apparently agreed to disagree about the Venus de Milo. Since each was hyperactively busy and each was confident he had solved the mystery, the men resumed other projects. Furtwängler’s second great work after Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture was Of Antique Gems. He was attracted to ancient carved gemstones because enough had survived to allow a thorough historical analysis. The first two volumes reproduce and discuss thousands of carved stones, which are cataloged according to content, form, and chronology. The third volume is a historical survey that one critic called the “phenomenal achievement of its marvelously productive century.”

  In 1900 Furtwängler had also begun re-excavating a temple on the island of Aegina that had been bought by the same King Ludwig of Bavaria who owned the theater on Melos when the Venus was discovered. Furtwängler made important finds, and the digs continued. In the fall of 1907 he traveled to Aegina again despite suffering from a fever. When his condition deteriorated, he was taken to a hospital in Athens, where, after several days of intense pain, he died on October 11, at age fifty-four. The city of Athens dedicated an honorary grave to him over which a Sphinx found on Aegina stands watch.

  Reinach never again found such a worthy combatant among archeologists. In the obituary he wrote for the Revue Archéologique, he called Furtwängler “the greatest archeologist of our times.… We remain, almost incredulous, by the side of this prematurely opened grave, astonished, even after so many proofs, that an untimely death was able to strike down this superb athlete and to make him so soon what he will always remain for our science—a hero.” Later he added, “No one has inherited his great and legitimate authority.”

  Reinach lived until 1932. In the Revue Archéologique he continued to report on any new papers or theories about the Venus de Milo. To his dismay, the story of the scuffle on the beach on Melos continued to live, and Reinach continued dutifully but wearily to contradict it. Nor were any of the more responsible scholarly papers of any great interest.

  His later years were marred by what became known as the Glozel affair. Numerous carvings and tablets, apparently from the Iron Age, were found near the French village of that name. They bore little resemblance to other Iron Age discoveries, and most experts believed they were fakes. Reinach, however, visited Glozel. Convinced that the finds were genuine, he became their most prominent and vocal champion. Eventually, though, as his health declined and he saw so much other work going unfinished, the Glozel controversy wearied him, and he complained about it sadly to Liane de Pougy. (The question of Glozel remains unresolved. Most archeologists still believe the artifacts are forgeries, although some modern chemical dating techniques tend to support their authenticity.)

  As his health deteriorated, mostly because of complications from diabetes, Reinach could walk only with help, and even then his pain was agonizing. Still, he attended scholarly meetings when the discussion was something he considered important. Finally he was confined to his bed. Bernard Berenson visited him. “Old Salomon,” he wrote, “looked li
ke a dying eagle, really beautiful, but very sad, and I fear not resigned.”

  One day in the spring of 1932 he sent his car for Liane de Pougy. It was the one time she was permitted in the home of Madame Reinach. Liane “saw him lying on a sofa, depressed, unhappy, his fine prophet’s face scarred with pain. When I came into the room he could hardly restrain his tears.” The room was tidy, fresh, bright, and lined with books in perfect order. Salomon had covered his legs, which were now completely useless, with a woolen rug. His forced inactivity made him frustrated and angry. Occasionally the pain that shot through him made him groan despite himself. After a short while Madame Reinach joined them. When Liane left, Salomon managed a smile and secretly blew her a kiss from his fingertips. Outside Madame Reinach gave her a bouquet of lilacs and tulips. In September he wrote to Liane, “I can say that, for the first time, life itself is a burden to me and I would happily take a ticket for another sphere.”

  SALOMON REINACH died on November 4, 1932. With his passing, more than a century of scholarship about the Venus de Milo came to a close. No one since has written anything approaching the importance of the work of Quatremère, Ravaisson, Furtwängler, or Reinach. And certainly no one has matched the passion of those men. Confronted with the questions inspired by the Venus de Milo—what is it? who made it and when? what was the original position of the arms?—scholars of the nineteenth century were eager to confront the void and propose answers.

  Such audacity carries risks with it, and in one sense the work of these venerable scholars was a failure, partly because their thinking was clouded by nationalism, French or German. But it is fair to say that those same scholars would be dismayed by the work of their modern counterparts: It would seem cool, analytic, even timid when compared to theirs. Nationalism has dropped away from contemporary scholarship, only to be replaced by other political agendas based on gender, sexuality, or, as we saw in the contemporary writing about the supposed fight on the beach in Melos, a desperate desire to discover victims of Western culture. The older scholars had an enthusiasm for the statue, almost a gratitude for its presence in their lives. Their appreciation shone through their prose even at its most academic. Contemporary scholars curb their enthusiasm, if indeed they have any. They want to appear superior to what Geoffrey Grigson in The Goddess of Love called “that rather chill giantess in the Louvre, the Venus de Milo; by whom most of us now are vaguely unmoved, I suspect, or even repelled.” The result is that little of originality or of particular importance has appeared since Reinach and Furtwängler’s Olympian quarrels in the scholarly journals of their day.

  Contemporary scholars, when they need to confront the Venus de Milo with more than a snide remark, turn to the authoritative source closest to hand, and that turns out to be Furtwängler. His reconstruction, with the goddess resting her left arm on a pillar, appears repeatedly, sometimes credited and sometimes not, to the exclusion of any other reconstruction. His triumph over his rivals in France—and in Germany, for that matter—is complete; but it is a triumph by default rather than by carefully considered judgment of the evidence.

  With all the evidence taken into account, it becomes clear that Furtwängler’s contribution was immense, although he made his share of errors. But, free of nationalism and of modern academic politics, and with all the evidence at hand, perhaps we ourselves can assume some of the nineteenth-century vigor and boldly risk confronting the statue and its mysteries.

  VI

  A Goddess with Golden Hair

  IN HIS dialogue Protagoras, written around 360 B.C., Plato mentioned sculptors briefly:

  “And suppose your idea was to go to Polyclitus of Argos or Phidias of Athens and pay them fees for your own benefit, and someone asked you in what capacity you thought of paying this money to them, what would you answer?”

  “I should say, in their capacity as sculptors.”

  “To make you what?”

  “A sculptor, obviously.”

  About five centuries later, while the Roman Empire was at its height, the satirist Lucian, who had been a sculptor himself as a young man, warned against such a life:

  If you become a sculptor, you will be no more than a workman, tiring yourself physically, receiving only a meager wage, a common laborer, a man lost in the crowd, bowing and scraping to the rich, humble servant of the eloquent, living like a hare and destined to become the prey of the strong. Even if you were a Phidias or a Polyclitus and created a thousand masterpieces, it is your art that would be praised and, of those who admired your work, there would not be one, if he had any common sense, who would wish to take your place. Skillful as you might be, you would always be regarded as an artisan, a mere mechanical, a man living by the work of his hands.

  In Greek and Roman times, despite the taste for sculpture in both societies, sculptors as a group hovered on an ill-defined plateau among skilled tradesmen. There was such a thing as art in the ancient world, but there wasn’t really such a thing as an artist in the modern sense. A sculptor might be considered more elevated than a sandal maker, say, but he was still a tradesman and part of that social group. A Greek seeing a sculptor, sweaty and covered with flakes of marble, his hands rough and gnarled from his work, would have the same reaction Lucian had so many years later. However much a sculptor’s work might be admired, few in ancient times would want to change places with one.

  There were exceptions. Phidias, for example, was both a masterful sculptor and a successful building contractor. He oversaw the construction of the Parthenon in Athens and the temple of Zeus at Olympia, and created the massive statues of Athena for the Parthenon and Zeus for Olympia. Although his talent as a sculptor was supreme, he owed his wealth and powerful position to his friendship with the great Pericles, who then dominated Athens and placed him in charge of the construction of the temples. That position in turn gave Phidias the power to let lucrative contracts. Unfortunately for him, his exalted status didn’t last. In time the enemies of Pericles accused Phidias first of embezzlement, then of impiety, and he died in prison.

  References like these from Plato and Lucian have become part of a large but patchy fabric of similar written references from across the centuries of antiquity. Scholars labor over every detail of that fabric, because what we know of Greek sculptors comes from occasional and often offhand references in the ancient texts that have survived. Some of these texts are histories or travelogues from writers such as Herodotus, Pliny, Plutarch, and Pausanias, and some are inscriptions, such as those on the bases for statues that have long since disappeared. Without this written record we would know nothing about the work of Phidias, Skopas, Polyclitus, Praxiteles, or any other great artist of the classical age, because none of their works, not even a single fragment of a single statue that we can identify, has survived.

  The only way we can get an approximation of what their work looked like is by basic, obvious Meisterforschung—that is, by linking a description in one of the texts to one or more surviving statues that appear to be later copies. Sometimes the correspondence between text and copy is exact and the identification can be absolute. One of the most famous Greek statues both then and now was the Diskobolos (Discus Thrower) by Myron. Lucian happened to describe it this way:

  Surely, I said, you do not speak of the discus thrower, who is bent over into the throwing position, is turned toward the hand that holds the discus, and has the opposite knee gently flexed, like the one [that] will straighten up again after the throw? Not that one, he said, for the Diskobolos of which you speak is one of the works of Myron.

  And enough statues that match this description have been unearthed to show how widely copied the Diskobolos was and to let us see its shape.

  At least we see its general shape, since the copies are not identical. The way the knees are bent, the way the hand holds the discus, the angle of the head, and many other details may all be different from one copy to another. Occasionally, some misguided scholar will try to reconstruct the original by taking the feet from one copy,
the head from another, and so on, but this is a useless, misleading exercise, since the resulting mélange must inevitably show the taste of the modern restorer rather than that of the antique sculptor.

  Furthermore, it’s a good possibility that none of the copyists duplicated the statue exactly and that they didn’t really care whether they did or not. There is a slight chance that one or another of the copyists could have been working from a cast, but more likely they were working from a copy and were not trying to make an exact replica. Instead they wanted to make their own version of what had become a standard subject, just as an early Renaissance master might paint an Annunciation in much the same style and pose as other Annunciations but with his own distinctive touches.

  The inexactness of copies is the weakness in Meisterforschung as Furtwängler used it. He pushed the connections too hard and made bold but insupportable assumptions, as did Reinach, Ravaisson, and other archeologists before him. It’s an easy thing to do. In the quotations above, Plato and Lucian both mention the same two sculptors, Phidias and Polyclitus. We know from a number of other sources that indeed their work was revered in the ancient world. But suppose that the reference in Plato was the only source for the names. One’s impulse would still be to assume that these two sculptors were considered masters in ancient times. Why else would Plato mention them? But without corroborating sources, it would also be possible that through some quirk of taste Plato happened to like the work of these two while few others did. Or, since Plato’s passage clearly concerns paying a sculptor to become his apprentice, perhaps Phidias and Polyclitus were known more for their teaching than for their own work.

  To complicate matters further, we tend to assume that the ancient world valued the works that have come down to us the same way we do, but that may not be true. The Venus de Milo, never mentioned in any surviving text, stuck in a niche in a gymnasium on a minor island, is a perfect example. Marble sculpture itself, though certainly important, was less important to the Greeks than all the marbles in our museums would indicate. It appears that the Greeks considered painting a higher art than sculpture and painters the greater craftsmen; but since so little Greek painting survives, its role is much diminished in our thinking about the ancient world. Although sculptors ranked below painters, they probably ranked above those who made mosaics. Sculptors at least signed their work while the creators of the glorious ancient mosaics did not.

 

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