Gregory Curtis (11 page)

B
Y CONTRAST
with the
Musée Napoléon, it was a bare and forlorn Louvre that Forbin inherited from Denon in 1816. In particular, it was empty of impressive antiquities. The
Apollo Belvedere was back in the Vatican. Worse, that very year, the British
parliament voted to purchase from Lord Elgin the marble reliefs he had ripped from the pediments of the
Parthenon and transported to London. Now called the Elgin marbles, they were undeniably from the age of classical Greece. Their provenance and their beauty provoked spasms of jealousy in German and French connoisseurs. The Elgin marbles were placed in the British Museum, which in a single stroke became the leading institution in Europe.

Forbin didn’t waste time moping. He immediately set out on a voyage to the Aegean and to
Egypt in search of antiquities to buy for the Louvre. It was during this trip that he dined with Brest. While on
Melos, he sketched the ruins of the Roman theater. As he worked, he stood not too far from the place where the Venus de Milo would be discovered three years later. In Cairo he disguised himself as an Arab and silently explored the mosques and other mysterious corners of the Arab quarter. He even visited the slave market, where he bid unsuccessfully on a young Circassian girl. Along the way, he did buy some antiquities for the museum, but nothing that would seize the imagination of Europe.

Upon his return, he became obsessed with the idea of sending French artists to England to make casts of the Elgin marbles for the Louvre. Then he expanded the notion to other massive casts, including one of
Michelangelo’s
Moses
. He wanted to commission Ingres and three other French artists to copy the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, exhibit it at one of the yearly salons at the Louvre, and then place it permanently in Notre Dame. These schemes, which seem preposterous today, were to Forbin “proof of [France’s] love of the arts and our eagerness to bring together such precious means of study for our artists.” He was again merely repeating the ideas of Winckelmann, which had by now become accepted wisdom: Arts flourished where there was an accumulation of masterpieces or copies of masterpieces for artists to study and imitate.

Of course, an original masterpiece was considered infinitely more valuable than a copy. With the
Apollo Belvedere returned
to the Vatican and the Elgin marbles the property of the British Museum, France had no equivalent example of antique art. This lamentable situation was not just a blow to national pride; it was a lack in what France could offer her artists for study and inspiration. In the future, French arts would suffer because of it and consequently lag behind artists in
England and
Italy, perhaps for generations. France, instead of advancing as the third great civilization in Europe after classical Greece and
Renaissance Italy, would slip slowly into the second-rate. It was a problem for which there appeared to be no solution.

In addition to his worries about the museum, Forbin was on the brink of despair over his health, his family, and his legacy as an artist. He was now in his early forties and time had begun to erode both his looks and his constitution. He had frequent colds that he could not cure. Often he suffered from the sensation that all the blood was rushing out of his head. He stopped drinking and ate only simple foods, but any physical effort exhausted him. Still, he pushed himself to work harder, uncertain how much longer he would be able to work at all.

As he worried about his health he also brooded about his family. He hadn’t been the best of husbands, but at a time when most marriages were arranged, especially among Forbin’s social class, a wife and husband having separate lives and separate lovers was common and accepted. His wife despised Paris and insisted on living in her family’s château in Burgundy with her mother and her two daughters. Forbin visited them there, sometimes staying a month or longer, but these visits were always painful. His wife was a lazy, ineffective woman who spent most of her days bickering endlessly with her mother. Forbin hated his mother-in-law passionately. Now widowed, she controlled the family fortune with tight fists.

Forbin’s daughters, Lydia and Valentine, had grown up in this tense, stingy atmosphere. Lydia was twenty and needed to enter society to find a husband, but she was plagued by a skin condition on her face and body that marred her appearance. Without his mother-in-law’s financial help, which she
adamantly refused to give, Forbin was despondent about Lydia’s chances. Valentine was sixteen and a beauty. She adored her father, but she was a quiet, passive girl who could never express her affection in a way he understood or believed in. Forbin’s wife consistently demanded money from him although all he had was his salary from the Louvre and whatever he could earn from his painting—and his works were no longer selling. His daughters’ unpleasant lives and shaky futures bore down on him. He couldn’t help them; nor, if his own health failed, could his daughters or his wife help him. But worst of all, Forbin was tortured by the knowledge that this late in life no one took him seriously as an artist or a man. His looks and his social gifts were so overwhelming that, except for Granet, few of his contemporaries could see anything else in him. He was considered a lightweight with artistic pretensions.
E. J. Delecluze, an important critic, novelist, and memoirist, who had known Forbin since they were both young art students in Paris, expressed exactly what the world thought of Forbin:

Delecluze was right that Forbin wanted the appearance of greatness, but he did not understand that the key to Forbin’s character was that he also wanted greatness itself, greatness as a painter and as a friend of art. Though he squandered time on Pauline Borghese and a succession of other intrigues, and though he became enamored of his own legend—he seems to have been seduced by his own looks and charm—Forbin worked
on his painting throughout his life, often for periods of intense concentration. When possible he was in his studio from eight in the morning until after six in the evening. “I’m working like a rabid dog,” he wrote Granet. He had conceived of a grand canvas titled
L’Inquisition
. When he finished, he wrote Granet, “I believe I have done nothing that can approach its combination of color and execution.” But the rumor spread, as Forbin had feared it would since there had been similar rumors before, that Forbin’s painting was really the work of Granet.

Then, late in the winter of 1820, as if in answer to a prayer, a letter came to the Louvre from the marquis de Rivière. He was in Toulon, where he had arrived on the
Lionne
with what he claimed was one of the greatest masterpieces of Greek sculpture wrapped in canvas and carefully stored belowdecks.

D
ESPITE THE
turbulence of his mind, and despite a persistent cold that he was treating with leeches, Forbin responded decisively, even bravely, to the letter from the marquis. The letter itself is lost, but from the flurry of internal correspondence it caused at the Louvre, it’s easy to guess what it said: Rivière asked for money, and Forbin gave it to him. On January 4, 1821, Forbin sent a letter authorizing the necessary expenses to have the statue unloaded from the ship, crated, and brought to Paris. Forbin had had to dicker with his superiors for permission—this consumed much of his time during the Christmas season of 1820—but he didn’t falter, even though he was being asked to invest in a work of art he had never seen.

Six weeks later, in mid-February, the marquis de Rivière and the Venus de Milo arrived in Paris. In a private audience with Louis XVIII on March 1, 1821, Rivière offered the king the statue for the royal museums. The homage was accepted. Consequently, Forbin had to reimburse Rivière the 1,500 francs he had
paid for the statue and the cost of the shipping. But now the Venus de Milo belonged to France. Forbin had the statue delivered to the Louvre.

(In 1826 Rivière made another payment from his own funds that has prevented the bitter diplomatic problems that still plague the
Elgin marbles. The dragoman Morousi had fined the primates on
Melos more than 7,500 piasters for allowing the statue to be carried away. A French admiral in the Aegean wrote to the Ministry of the Marine that the primates wanted reimbursement. After hearing this news, Rivière repaid the primates himself. In return, they signed a quittance to any further claims for money or for the statue, which has been honored. In the early 1980s, when the actress
Melina Mercouri, who had become the Greek minister of culture and science, began demanding the return of the Elgin marbles from England, she repeatedly declined to make any claim for the Venus de Milo.)

But this beautiful statue from Melos—what exactly was it? Forbin had acquired it assuming that it was beyond doubt a masterpiece from the classical age of Greece, around 450 to 350
B.C
. Rivière’s letter to Forbin had quoted the opinion of Fauvel, the French consul in Athens who had seen the Venus aboard ship in the moonlight. According to Rivière’s letter, Fauvel said that the statue was a masterpiece “worth at least 100,000 ecus.” Forbin knew Fauvel. He had visited him during his recent voyage to Greece and Egypt and considered him “our Nestor of eastern antiquities.” Fauvel’s endorsement gave Forbin the assurance to go forward. But if the statue was anything but a product of the classical age in Greece, then its value would presumably fall far below 100,000 ecus. Worse, it could not stand with the Elgin marbles in England or the
Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican as the great prize whose glory animated, even sanctified, the national identity.

Cautiously, Forbin sequestered the statue in a back workshop of the Louvre, where he allowed only a few trustworthy scholars and artists to see it. The custom at that time was to
repair and restore broken statues. That meant the scholars had to determine the original position of the arms. Doing that meant deciding what the statue had originally been. Which goddess was she? What was she doing?

But Forbin couldn’t wait patiently for these scholarly investigations to take their course. The first report from the museum needed to express the only opinion that would satisfy Forbin, the king, indeed all of France: that the statue was a Venus from the classical age. Having the right scholar state this opinion in a convincing way was necessary to protect the investment in both money and pride that the French had made in this statue. Forbin had to find that scholar.

Unfortunately, word about the statue had already begun to leak out. Dumont d’Urville had arrived back in France in October 1820 after the
Chevrette
had finished its scientific mission in the Black Sea. Still consumed by the need to create a personal legend, he couldn’t wait to take advantage of the opportunity presented to him by the statue from
Melos. On November 24, 1820, he read a paper—“Account of an hydrographic expedition in the Levant and the Black Sea by his majesty’s ship the
Chevrette
commanded by M.
Gautier, captain of the vessel, in the year 1820”—to the
Society of Sciences and Arts of Toulon. He then read the same paper to the Academy of Sciences in Paris on January 22, 1821.

D’Urville is the hero of his own paper. He describes the farmer digging for rocks, finding the niche, and taking the upper half of the statue to the cowshed. He talks about going to see the statue himself, but he never explains how he came to do so or alludes to anyone else, although Brest and Matterer were certainly there with him. He does not mention that Brest and the four ships’ captains all had seen the statue before he had. He did originally thank the faithful Matterer and some others, but only for their roles
after
the discovery. He deleted these words from his final version.

Since his report was the first news of the statue to be published in France, d’Urville was able to cement the public perception
that he had been the sole discoverer of the Venus de Milo. He instantly became what he longed to be: a famous man. As he wrote in his journal in the weeks after reading his paper, “Thus the obscure ensign, thirty and one-half years old, with more than seven years at that rank, is suddenly the one sought out by artists, recognized by experts, welcomed by eminent persons.” In August 1821 d’Urville wrote a letter proposing himself for membership in a provincial learned society named the
Academy of Caen, the city in Normandy where he had attended school. He boasted, “I owe to a lucky happenstance the opportunity to be the first to visit, describe and make known the celebrated
Venus Victrix
of
Melos.” Beginning exactly here, his fame would continue to grow until it extended throughout Europe.

A
T LEAST
d’Urville had said only that the statue was a Venus and, for once recognizing his limitations, had not hazarded an opinion about when it was made. The damage was not as bad as it might have been, but d’Urville’s self-promotion tended to force Forbin’s hand. He had to display the statue soon, since public pressure to see it would become greater as the news continued to spread. On March 7, 1821, he had the first official announcement about the acquisition of the statue placed in the
Moniteur
, a government newspaper. It concluded with an assertion that inadvertently expressed both Forbin’s hopes and his frustrations: “Experts are busy researching what must have been the position of the arms in order to proceed with the restoration. The very pronounced movement of the torso seems to assure the success of this research soon.”

This public confidence was contrary to the confusion the statue was creating deep in the workshops of the Louvre. Unfortunately, each of the sages Forbin admitted there had his own opinion about the original position of the arms.