Gregory Curtis (12 page)

In truth, they weren’t researching so much as groping in the
dark.
Archeology barely existed as a science then, and the whole world of Greek antiquity was just being rediscovered. Very little reliable information was available, while a great deal of mistaken information was accepted as true. For example, any statue unearthed in Italy was considered to be an ancient original. Then a duplicate would turn up at another site, and yet another at a third place. By 1821 scholars were slowly beginning to realize how many copies of famous statues had been carved in ancient times. A few years after the discovery of the Venus de Milo, even the revered
Apollo Belvedere was proved to be a Roman copy.

Since the science of archeology was just beginning to develop, a critic who was writing about antiquities could let his mind range freely, unfettered by inconvenient facts. Papers that at the time were considered learned and scientific seem today like the most indulgent flights of fancy. And the scholars at the Louvre let their fancies soar. Some thought the statue was not a Venus but a Victory. Others thought it was a Venus holding a bow. Or maybe she was holding a shield and gazing at her reflection in it. And, of course, each of their proposed reconstructions would produce a different position for the arms.

But unexpectedly, perhaps even disastrously, the statue presented other problems that were just as difficult as her missing arms. When Forbin’s staff unwrapped the parcels of canvas containing the Venus de Milo, they found that four pieces had broken away from the hips. Two came from the right hip and two from the left. These four pieces had first broken away in ancient times and been reattached with plaster. The large piece from the right hip that Voutier had described was the only piece broken when the statue left Melos. The three others must have broken away during the sea voyage to France when humidity or the rocking of the ship loosened the plaster. No surviving record from that period mentions these pieces at all, and we know about them only from events that occurred fifty years later. The restorers in the back workshop reattached the four pieces with plaster, two on one hip and two on the other, assuming that no
one would ever discover how much their handiwork had affected the statue.

Nor did the complications stop there. The base of the herm with the young man’s head was broken so that its right side formed a jagged wedge. The base of the Venus de Milo was broken on its left side, where there was a jagged cavity. The wedge on the base of the herm slid nicely into the cavity at the base of the statue. It appeared, therefore, that this undistinguished herm and its base once belonged to the Venus de Milo. Worse, there was an inscription in Greek on the base of the herm that read, “…  xandros son of Menides citizen of
Antioch of Meander made the statue.” If the base of the statue and the base of the herm were originally the same slab, then an unknown sculptor named Alexandros had carved the Venus de Milo. And worst of all, Alexandros had lived in Antioch, a city in western Turkey that, as the scholars at the Louvre well knew, had not been founded until 270
B.C.
, at least a hundred years after the classical age in Greece had ended.

According to Winckelmann’s theory of the cycles of art, that would have been a time when art was in decline. Had Forbin committed the museum, the king, and all of France to a statue by a nobody who had lived too late to have had any contact at all with the great Greek masters? If so, all Dumont d’Urville’s bragging before learned societies and in the salons of Paris would only add to the museum’s embarrassment when the real story came to light.

Slowly a solution appeared. The more the experts at the Louvre pondered the problem, the more they thought the base was wrong. The fit wasn’t right after all, and the marble wasn’t the same. And even if the base
did
belong with the statue, it could not have belonged to it originally. It must be the remains of some later, decadent addition made during the declining Hellenistic era. It was an ugly barnacle on the hull of a sleek yacht. Worse than that, the inscribed base was a threat to the statue’s very integrity. Anyone who was jealous of France’s prize possession
could use this inscription to denigrate it, to cheapen it. Since the slab was not really, truly part of the statue, why give anyone this ammunition to use against France’s treasure?

So the slab disappeared. Forbin either had it destroyed or hid it so deeply in some recess of the warehouses of the Louvre that it has never been found. We would not know about it today, and certainly we would have no idea what the inscription said, except for Forbin’s loyalty to his difficult, conceited, yet inspiring former teacher David.

David had read the notice in the
Moniteur
about the statue. He was now living in Brussels, where he had fled after the
Restoration, certain that the new regime would want his head. In fact, Louis XVIII put aside any malice he may have felt. Through intermediaries he implied to David that if he were to petition to return, he would be granted amnesty. But David, instead of petitioning, which he saw as demeaning to his dignity, remained in Brussels, seething with resentment. But a statue from classical Greece was irresistible for someone with David’s
aesthetic, and he wanted to see what it looked like. He wrote to Paris to ask to have a drawing sent to him.

David’s request fell to the sculptor J. B. J. Debay, who had been a student in David’s school at the same time as Forbin. Now he was the curator in charge of antique restorations at the Louvre. Debay gave the task to his sixteen-year-old son, Auguste, who was an art student. Forbin allowed him into the back workshop in order to make the drawing and this happened to be during the time when the inscribed base was still in place against the base of the statue. Young Debay, either unconcerned by or unaware of the debate over the base and the inscription, drew them both quite clearly. The jagged edge of the inscribed base seems to match the jagged edge at the base of the statue. The Greek letters of the inscription are clear.

Debay made one original drawing and then a tracing of it. The tracing went to David. Debay gave the original to his father. Forbin either forgot or never knew the elder Debay had the drawing until it was too late.

M
EANWHILE
the Louvre continued to remain silent about the statue. At the time there were two dominating classical scholars in France, either of whom could write the first paper that would establish the museum’s thinking about its new treasure. One was Quatremère de Quincy, a Winckelmann disciple who had introduced David to the wonders of antiquity in Naples more than thirty years earlier. The other was
Toussaint-Bernard Emeric-David. These two men were bitter intellectual rivals who seem to have disliked each other personally as well. They were about the same age—Quatremère was sixty-six and Emeric-David sixty-five—and as young men had both studied for the law. They both had gotten in trouble during the Revolution—Quatremère was sent to jail on a warrant signed by David—and neither ever shrank from a good scrap. But the
resemblances end there. Quatremère was effete and remote, whereas Emeric-David was an energetic man of the world, devoted to his family, who had broad intellectual interests. Those differences alone might have been enough to make them wary of each other, but they became enemies because of their different responses to Winckelmann.

In short, Emeric-David disagreed with Winckelmann, while Quatremère embraced him. Emeric-David did not believe, as Winckelmann did, that art moved in a cycle of four stages from beginning to development to flowering to decadence and decline. He thought Greek art in particular had not declined after the classical period but had a long, glorious history from the time of
Phidias until at least the Roman emperor
Hadrian in the first half of the second century. And since art didn’t move in cycles, there was no reason to think that art in France was in hopeless decline. It could flourish just as Greek art had.

For Quatremère all this was simply a heresy, and a fatuous one at that. European art was clearly in decline after the great flowering during the
Renaissance, just as Greek art had declined after the classical age. The only way to revive art was to imitate the ancient masters as Winckelmann had said.

Since Forbin’s temperament was closer to that of Emeric-David, and since both men were raised in Aix and had extensive family ties in Provence, he would seem to have been Forbin’s natural ally. But Emeric-David, free of the prevailing orthodoxy derived from Winckelmann, didn’t believe that the statue from
Melos belonged to the classical era of ancient Greece. He thought it was from a later period. Nor did he think it was a Venus. Instead he concluded that the statue represented the nymph Melos, the divine guardian of the island. For Forbin, this would not do at all.

Quatremère, stuffy and superior though he may have been, was at least dependable. He was a dour but impressive man with dark black eyebrows and cropped white hair. He had a long, hatchet nose, heavy bags beneath his eyes, a thin mouth, and a double chin. He used his voice, which boomed from his chest, as
a cudgel in debate. Independently wealthy (his family had made its fortune selling drapery to Louis XVI) and inspired by Winckelmann, he had lived in Italy for eight years during his twenties. Since then, the art of the classical age in Greece had become the basis for all his aesthetic theories and judgments. He elaborated his thinking in a blizzard of books, articles, reviews, and papers across a lifetime of ninety-four years. The further art moved from his ideals, the more he wrote and the more his prose became pompous and doctrinaire. In 1816 he had become permanent secretary of the
Académie des Beaux-Arts, a position he would hold until 1839. Thus elevated, he was able to toss down his opinions from on high like Zeus raining thunderbolts. His influence on David alone changed the course of French art.

Unlike Forbin, with his mistresses and his charming way with fashionable hostesses, Quatremère found nothing interesting or attractive about women. On the contrary, he disliked them intensely and never married. His closest emotional attachment was a nobleman he met in Italy who was also a painter and sculptor. Otherwise he lived entirely for the sake of his stern ideas, theories, and dogmas.

Just two years earlier Forbin and Quatremère had quarreled rather bitterly. Quatremère wanted the Académie to judge the art in the museum’s Salon of 1819 only after the show had been taken down. Forbin wanted the judging done while the show was still up so that visitors could know the winners. The real reason for the argument—carried out in highly formal but steely letters—was that Forbin had accepted the
Raft of the Medusa
by Géricault for the salon. This painting introduced
romanticism to French art, and romanticism, which imitated nature directly rather than basing itself on the Greek ideal of nature, and which honored individual feeling over classical rules, rejected everything Quatremère believed about art. He hoped to diminish the effect of Géricault’s painting on the public by delaying the judging. Forbin as always was a difficult opponent to outmaneuver, and his views prevailed.

Yet for all his bluster, for all his fruitless determination to
bend art in France to his reactionary ideas, for all his humorless severity, Quatremère did have a formidable intellect. And when he was observing a work of art that fit his aesthetic theories, especially one like the Venus de Milo that not only fit his theories but in his eyes
proved
them, he had formidable judgment as well. Best of all for Forbin, Quatremère believed the statue was exactly what the museum wanted it to be. Forbin trusted Quatremère, his former combatant, in the back room of the Louvre and ignored Emeric-David, the fellow son of Provence.

On April 21, 1821, just six weeks after the statue arrived at the Louvre, Quatremère read a paper entitled “Dissertation on the antique statue of Venus discovered on the island of Melos” to a meeting of the
Académie des Beaux-Arts. The Académie was the leading official institution concerned with the fine arts, and its members were the best possible audience to endorse the paper’s conclusions about the statue. Forbin had known what the paper said—and that it said the right thing—before the meeting. But the result was successful beyond his most ambitious dreams.

Quatremère begins with a simple—for him—statement of why the statue was so important: “The appearance of a new work of Greek genius is always an event in the empire of the arts, above all when unimpeachable testimonies of the authenticity or the presumable originality of this work add the weight of their authority to the judgment of taste.” In other words, this is an authoritative statue because it is beautiful and because the evidence proves that it is truly Greek. Of course, he continues, the same is true of the
Elgin marbles, so recently arrived in England. Both the scholar and the public can have confidence in them, although not in “most of these antique remnants, that come down to us without a title, without a date, without the name of an author or a country, without any certificate as to their origin.” So he loses no time in proclaiming this statue to be the equal of the Elgin marbles, even though it had arrived in France without a title, a date, or any certificate of its origin.