The niche where the Venus de Milo was found had an engraved stone over its entrance. This stone arrived at the Louvre with the statue. Evidently Rivière acquired it when he stopped at Melos on his voyage back to France with the Venus in the hold. It has since disappeared, but fortunately Clarac carefully copied the inscription. It said, “Bacchios, son of S[extus] Atius, having finished his term as assistant gymnasiarque, [dedicates] both the exedra and the [missing word] to Hermes Hercules.” Here we have the assistant gymnasiarch fulfilling his obligations by dedicating statues for the gymnasium. Furtwängler thought that the missing word, which had been obscured by a crack in the stone, mentioned a statue. Assuming that he is correct, the inscription over the niche mentioned Hermes, Hercules, and a statue. Inside, on that April day in 1820, Voutier and Yorgos found a herm of Hermes, a herm of Hercules, and a statue. All this fits together too neatly to be merely coincidental. The Venus de Milo must have been found in the place where she was originally displayed. And the two herms were part of the same display.
The base of the herm representing Hercules, missing from the Louvre since 1821, was the one with the inscription that read “[Alex]andros son of Menides citizen of Antioch of Meander made the statue.” The long battles over whether or not this base belonged with the statue were fruitless, motivated entirely by the French insistence on dating the statue much earlier than the Hellenistic era. Since Antioch wasn’t founded until about 280 B.C., after the classical age had already passed, the French could not admit that the inscription belonged with their revered work of art. Quatremère, Ravaisson, and Reinach all fought valiantly but in a futile cause. The legs wrapped in cloth, along with the mixture of realism with classicism in the carving, date the Venus de Milo to Hellenistic times anyway. That means that the inscription and the date it implies are perfectly in keeping with the statue. In fact, Antiochus Epiphanes, a Hellenistic king who reigned in Antioch and was famous in the Bible for trying to force Greek religion on the Jews, was so enamored of Greek culture that he made Antioch a center of Greek art. He died in 164 B.C., but for generations after him Antioch was famous for its wealth and luxury, its devotion to pleasure, and its love of the arts. If a patron anywhere in the Greek world wanted to hire a sculptor with skill and training, Antioch was a place where one could be found.
Two more points make it certain that the inscribed base of the beardless herm and the base of the Venus were connected. One is the inscription itself. Since it says that Alexandros of Antioch “made the statue,” the base must have belonged with some statue or the inscription would make no sense. The Venus de Milo was the only statue found near this inscribed base. More importantly, at the Louvre the broken edge of this inscribed base was placed in the jagged cavity on the left side of the Venus de Milo, and the two fit together perfectly. Debay’s drawing shows them matching. Clarac is explicit about how well the statue and the base matched. He says the inscribed base fit perfectly with “the alignment of the front surface of the ancient plinth [that is, the base of the statue] and it also fits exactly both at the rear and at the side with the fractures.” In other words, not only do the fractures of the two pieces fit, but the inscribed base is the same depth and height as the base of the statue. The statue and the inscribed base were created at the same moment.
Unknown to the nineteenth-century scholars, the name of the artist from Antioch that is on the broken base is also on an inscription from Thespiae, a city near Mount Helicon on the mainland of Greece where an important contest of poetry and theatrical arts was held every five years. In an inscription from around 80 B.C., Alexandros of Antioch is mentioned twice, as a victor at singing and at composing. Evidently he was the composer and singer of songs as well as a sculptor. The Thespiae inscription also allows us to date the statue closer to 80 than 150 B.C.
The life we can read from these inscriptions is typical of an artist of the time. Leaving his home in Antioch, wandering wherever his commissions took him, he managed to create some ephemeral fame by singing songs here and carving sculptures there. He may have been a great poet and musician, but all we know is that he was good enough to win the contest in Thespiae. As a sculptor, however, he was indisputably a genius whose name deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Phidias, Praxiteles, and the other ancient masters. Alexandros, son of Menides, citizen of Antioch, was the artist who created the Venus de Milo.
The arms restored
THE POSITION of the right arm is not difficult to determine. It extended down across her stomach and bent toward the left. The stump of the right arm precludes almost any other position. And a hole beneath the right breast, now filled with plaster but still visible, once held a tenon to support the right arm as it bent across her stomach.
The position of the left arm is more mysterious. The solution to the mystery depends on understanding how Alexandros intended his statue to be displayed.
Since the inscribed base that held the herm of Hercules was part of the original statue, the herm stood at the goddess’s left. That means she could not have been grouped with a statue of Mars as both Quatremère de Quincy and Félix Ravaisson had supposed, since there is no place for the warrior to stand. Furtwängler’s restoration with her left arm resting on a pillar is also impossible, since there is no place for the pillar either. The Venus de Milo standing beside an undistinguished herm of Hercules, a figure that is too short and too narrow for the large statue next to it, is another indication that the Greek aesthetic was not the same as ours. It’s an ugly, ludicrous composition, and neither the French scholars nor Furtwängler believed that a sculptor with the skill and sensibility to create the Venus de Milo would have joined his masterpiece with something so trivial. But Alexandros of Antioch did exactly that.
Perhaps he had his reasons. It was rare for a large statue to stand beside a small one, but not unknown. Salomon Reinach’s own Index of Greek and Roman Statuary of 1908, a revised version of a work by Clarac, shows several statues of Venus with small figures standing almost underfoot and one, from a collection in Berlin, of a Venus standing beside a herm.
Or perhaps Alexandros had no choice. The passage from Lucian about a sculptor’s life laments the way sculptors must be subservient to their patrons. This unsightly coupling might have been what Bacchios, the assistant gymnasiarch who dedicated the niche and therefore could have commissioned the statue, insisted on having. Even during that distant era, it wouldn’t have been the first time that an artist’s patron proved to have unfortunate taste.
Much of the statue’s power derives from the contrasting dynamics between the draped and undraped portions. The motion of the lower half of the statue is toward the right. Her hips are turned slightly to the right, and her bent left knee turns inward, a movement that draws the drapery tight against her left leg and reveals its shape. The folds in the drapery begin high on the left hip and thigh and fall dramatically down toward the right. All this powerful movement ends abruptly at the right leg. Straight and firm, it supports most of the goddess’s weight. Its rigidity resolves all the motion to the right in the drapery and gives the statue a stable foundation in the midst of so much dynamism.
By contrast, all the motion in the upper part of the statue is to the left: The chest, shoulders, and head all turn to the left as the goddess stares into the distance. Originally, this leftward motion must have appeared even more pronounced, since the right arm must have extended down across her stomach and to the left. That would strongly emphasize yet again the movement in that direction.
But in the statue as we see it today all this motion is unresolved. There must have been some reason for it. The herm is too small. The answer must lie with the left arm and what it was doing.
The carving on the left side of the statue is less careful and refined than on the rest. Both Quatremère de Quincy and Ravaisson thought that was because she was standing next to a warrior. But if the statue was displayed so that it was seen in three-quarter right profile—and its shape makes it clear that this is how Alexa
ndros wanted his statue to be seen—then the left side of the statue wouldn’t be visible either. In the gymnasium wall niche, enclosed on three sides, the sculptor could place his statue exactly at the angle he wanted.
At the time of the discovery a left hand holding an apple was found in the niche with the statue. This hand was even more roughly carved than the left side of the statue, but it was carved from identical marble and had the proper proportions to belong to the Venus. A portion of the upper left arm, also in the correct proportion and of the same marble, was found as well.
The upper arm fit in the left shoulder of the statue. It stuck out directly to the left. Debay’s drawing shows that as clearly as it shows the perfect fit between the base of the statue and the broken base with the inscription. So the left arm, most likely bent somewhat at the elbow, extended directly to the left with its hand—the hand holding the apple—held aloft. The Venus de Milo was holding up the apple in her left hand as she serenely contemplated the symbol of her victory over Juno and Minerva.
A Venus with an apple is a common motif in Greek sculpture, but it is particularly appropriate for the Venus de Milo. The Greek word for apple was melon. The island was named Melos because to the Greeks its shape resembled an apple. An apple became the symbol of the island. A sculptor who was commissioned to carve a Venus for the island of Melos could hardly resist a pose that emphasized this double meaning.
Displayed as she was in those days, the Venus de Milo, whose image we know so well, would have been barely recognizable to us. She stood in the shadows of the niche, competing for attention with the pattern painted on the walls. She wore jewels on her head, ears, and arms. The marble of her torso was polished. Her hair was painted gold; her eyes and lips were red. Her drapery was painted in a pattern. Turned to a three-quarter right profile, she looked away from the men and boys who saw her. All her attention was on the apple she held in her raised left arm, which extended obliquely back into the shadows of the niche.
That was the statue that Alexandros created for the gymnasium on Melos. The passing of centuries, which wore away the paint and the polish, which saw the jewels purloined and the arms broken off, created the statue we know. But some shadow or ghost of the original seems to have survived and at the moment of discovery was still capable of making its presence felt. The early witnesses—Olivier Voutier, Dumont d’Urville, the captains from the French ships—all assumed that the statue showed Venus holding the apple from Paris. It never occurred to them that the statue was anything else. The shade of the statue in its original glory led these mariners closer to the truth than all the hard work, contaminated as it was by national rivalries, of the sage scholars who came after them.
VII
The Last Chapter
IN 1886 a German anatomist named W. Henke and his colleague Christoph Hasse found themselves in an intense dispute over the Venus de Milo. As German scholars were prone to do, Henke had studied the statue in minute detail. In a paper that year, he concluded that imperfections in the statue’s anatomy meant that the sculptor had worked from a live model and that this live model was deformed! Noting that the legs were of different lengths and that the pelvis was tilted off the horizontal, Henke believed that the model must have limped. An even greater flaw, according to him, was the asymmetry of the goddess’s face. The line that connected both pupils and the line that connected the two ends of the lips were not parallel to each other. And neither of those lines was perpendicular to the nose. These asymmetries did occur in life, Henke admitted, but always as an abnormality.
That last conclusion aggravated Hasse, a fellow at the anatomical institute in Breslau. In his paper on the Venus de Milo, published in 1882, he had praised the statue’s naturalism. Now he decided that Henke’s paper was simply wrong, because he didn’t believe that an asymmetrical face was at all abnormal.
To test his assumption, Hasse created a square grid and photographed the face of the statue and the faces of a number of friends behind it. Measuring by the grid, he could see that every face was asymmetrical. The more Hasse studied the grids, the more asymmetries he found. Among the most important was that in every case—including the statue—the left eye was closer to the center of the face than the right eye, and a line connecting the two pupils was not horizontal.
Hasse suspected that the asymmetry of the pupil line in the statue and in people compensated for the tilt of the pelvis. He had long been aware of a slight bow in most people’s spinal cords that shifts the head to one side or the other. In 1888 Hasse and a colleague published a study of the pelvises of women showing that they had the same asymmetrical tilt of the hips as the Venus de Milo. In 1893 he published a study of the backbones of 5, 141 men, which found that only one third of the backbones were completely straight. All these asymmetries had the effect of canceling themselves out so that the line between the eyes was parallel to the horizon. With this research Hasse had disproved the centuries-old prevailing wisdom of both anatomists and artists that human features were symmetrical. Asymmetry was the norm; symmetry was abnormal.
Hasse’s work was the beginning of what has become a fertile and fascinating branch of research in psychology, one that concentrates in particular on how people display emotions. As a simple example, cover one side of a face in a photograph, then the other. The two sides will often appear to show different emotions. Paul Erkman, author of Emotion in the Human Face and Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage, is one well-known researcher in this area. Research methodology has progressed far beyond photographing the face of the Venus de Milo behind a grid, but that is where it began. A meticulous examination of the statue, followed by a dispute over the results, led to a wholly unexpected and unexplored path toward comprehending the human psyche. It’s unusual for a work of art to inspire a new field of scientific inquiry, but the Venus de Milo did.
The statue has inspired many artists who, like the scientists, use it for their own purposes. It’s not so much the anatomical detail that they respond to but something true—true in the deepest sense—in the form of the sculpture that makes the accurate anatomy matter. Cézanne sketched the Venus in the Louvre and used her pose in his paintings of bathers. Magritte painted a small replica, making the head white, the body the color of flesh, the nipples pink, the drapery deep blue, and the base black. These colors, he said, “restore the Venus to an unexpected life.” Dalí sculpted and painted her in a variety of ways. Seeing that her neck is quite long, he created a giraffe Venus with an elongated neck as tall as her body. He also sculpted a Venus with drawers coming out of her breasts, stomach, and left knee. A photograph of the statue wedged into Ravaisson’s oak crate could have been his inspiration here. More recently, Jim Dine obsessively returns to the statue in paintings and sculptures. Three of these, cast as massive bronzes, stand on the Avenue of the Americas in midtown New York. Clive Barker has shown her wrapped in rope, locked in chains, and impishly, with her tongue stuck in her cheek. These are only a handful of the many works of art whose inspiration began with the Venus de Milo. All this shows that the truth within her can take many forms. It can even put its tongue in its cheek and pretend it’s only kidding.
Artists are seekers after truth, but the Venus de Milo also inspires those who seek something else: increased sales. Advertisers use the statue either to associate its beauty and truth with their product or to get a laugh. In 1996 a Mercedes ad showed a photograph of the statue across the page from their new Class E sedan. None of the type in the ad referred to the statue. Its presence spoke for itself. Leaving aside the appeal to classic beauty, a mid-eighties ad for the French retailer Darty has the statue saying, “When I see Darty prices, it makes my arms fall”; that is, she is dumbfounded.
And then there are the many cartoons and parodies in which low culture gives a gleeful raspberry to the high. A Greek sculptor in his workshop with the Venus de Milo complains to a friend, “I just can’t do arms.” As Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator rides past her,
she suddenly raises a right arm in salute. In a publicity still from 1957, Jayne Mansfield in a tight sweater and tight skirt stands next to her at the Louvre. The poster for Robert Altman’s Nashville shows the Venus in a cowboy hat and dark glasses.
But the statue’s success as a cultural icon has worked against it among scholars and critics. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, writers on the statue were uniformly admiring. The rhapsodies of romantic poets in her praise became almost a cliché. Back then it was the artists and the intelligentsia who were leading the masses toward appreciating the statue. Today the masses don’t need to be convinced, while the intelligentsia have lost interest. Although there are scholars who still see the statue as a great work of art, for an ambitious critic who wants to demonstrate his or her discernment, there is no point at all in simply agreeing with the popular taste. We’ve seen how Geoffrey Grigson, an eminent British scholar, says he is “repelled” by the statue. R. R. R. Smith, a professor of classical archeology and art at Oxford, calls her “matronly,” “heavy,” “blank,” and “solemn.” In 1975 Martin Robertson wrote in his A History of Greek Art that the statue’s “mild merits hardly justify the figure’s extraordinary reputation, which started by propaganda has become perpetuated by habit.”
Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs, by Salvador Dalí (illustration credit 7.1)
Venus with Tongue in Cheek, by Clive Barker, 1990 (illustration credit 7.2)
Gregory Curtis Page 20