Gregory Curtis (13 page)

He continues with a brief account of the discovery and a detailed description with special attention to the scrapes,
gouges, and other ravages of time. (Few if any in his Académie audience had seen the statue yet.) He does mention the inscribed base, only to insist in a footnote that it was a later addition whose purpose was merely to help support the statue. This block, chosen at random, happened to be inscribed, but “one cannot draw any conclusion relating to the creator of the work from the inscription on the piece of marble.” Perhaps it was his conscience that led him to mention the inscription at all. He does not record what the inscription actually said.

Quatremère insists that the statue is a Venus. More than that, upon his very first sight of the statue, the turn of her body and the position and expression of her head made him think that she must have originally been grouped with another statue. By examining more closely the left side, “where the drapes are far less carefully done, in considering the much less happy effect of the face on that side,” he became certain that he was right.

But what was the other statue? Quatremère cites several other statues, medallions, and coins that show Venus with her body turned to the left and her left foot resting on some support in a pose similar to that of the Venus de Milo. Next to her stands Mars, the god of war. Venus’s left arm is on his shoulder, and her right reaches across to touch his right biceps. She hopes that her beauty will restrain him so he will stay with her instead of going to war. Therefore, Quatremère concludes, the Venus de Milo must also have been originally grouped with a statue of Mars. The missing arms must have been reaching out to him, touching him on the shoulder and arm. The look on her face, turned imploringly toward him, is her yearning for him to stay. Quatremère also argues that the arms of the statue broke off when it was separated from the statue of Mars and that the other pieces found with the Venus—the hand with the apple, fragments of arms, the two herms—were all part of a later, crude restoration.

After this grand moment, the rest of the paper is essentially nicely articulated propaganda for the statue and, by extension, for the museum. He speculates about whether the Venus de Milo was the original statue in this pose from which all the other
examples were copied. He admits that it is impossible to know with certainty. “If, however,” he adds cleverly, “one wishes to understand [original] in a sense relating to the superiority of merit among the copies of the same work, there will be, I think, no reason to doubt that the Venus de Milo, in the group of which it was a part, was the original of those others that we have cited.” He declares that since the statue is clearly not from the decadent period of Greek art, it must have come from the workshop or the school of
Praxiteles, the greatest of Greek sculptors. There is no support for this view other than the wishes of Quatremère, Forbin, the museum, the king, and the rest of France that it be true. England might have the marbles from the
Parthenon designed by
Phidias; but France, courtesy of Quatremère, could claim it possessed a work by the one Greek sculptor who was even greater.

In his final three paragraphs Quatremère directly confronted the problem of restoring the arms. A modern curator would never consider adding whole new elements to an incomplete ancient work, but in the early nineteenth century restoration was the common practice. Quatremère swam against the current by arguing that the statue should not be restored at all. His reasoning was ingenious. He said Venus shouldn’t be restored because it would be impossible to create the second statue of Mars that originally went with it. “Even if,” he continued, “one were limited to restoring the arms, using the other works as a model for the restitution, that could only make one feel even more the emptiness and the absence of the figure to which she was joined; the statue, remaining always isolated, could only produce an equivocal movement and an action that nothing would explain to the viewer.”

In fact, a few restorations to the statue were made at the Louvre. The broken tip of the nose was fixed, as were the nipple of the left breast and the lower lip. The most noticeable and unfortunate restoration was an ugly plaster left foot sticking out from under some even uglier plaster folds of drapery. But the arms were not restored. Often it’s said that Louis XVIII himself
decreed that the statue should be left as it was. But Forbin made the decision not to restore the arms on the advice of Quatremère. It was this stiff, arrogant reactionary who prevented the harm to the statue—possibly severe—that any restoration of the two missing arms would have made inevitable.

A
T THIS
time the conservator of antiquities at the Louvre was the
comte de Clarac. The arrival of the statue from Melos, which technically was in his jurisdiction, should have been a crowning event in Clarac’s career. Instead it brought him nothing but frustration and grief.

At forty-four, the same age as Forbin, Charles-Othon-Frédéric-Jean-Baptiste de Clarac was an odd, lovable busybody. He liked to spend an hour or two each morning carving fantasy objects in ivory on a lathe. Although he never married and his family line died out with him, he often spent evenings making elaborate jumping jacks for the children of his friends. He was frequently broke, despite his title, since his family’s property had been confiscated during the Revolution and he had to live on his meager salary from the Louvre. Yet he maintained the air of a bon vivant who loved good food and wine when he could afford them. Like Forbin, he had a gift for composing comic songs. One was a parody of the “Marseillaise.” The chorus of the original says,

Clarac’s version says,

(In French it’s cleverer:
“Aux armes, marmitons, / Débouchons les flacons, / Buvons, buvons, / Qu’un vin bien pur abreuve nos poumons!”
)

Clarac spoke German, English, Italian, Portuguese, and one of the Polynesian languages. Exiled during the Revolution, an officer in armies that fought against the French republican forces, he returned to France during the Empire. Eventually he became tutor to the children of Napoleon’s sister Caroline in Italy. At the same time he directed some of the
excavations at Pompeii. That was when he discovered his taste for archeology. Like Dumont d’Urville and most intellectuals of the era, he was also fascinated by
botany. On a long voyage to South America he made precise and painstaking drawings of the flora of the Amazon.

Clarac approached his job at the museum rather like a botanist: He cataloged and described relentlessly. His great work, which still has historical value today, was a complete inventory of the statuary possessed by the Louvre. Yet even those who were sympathetic to Clarac did not claim he was a distinguished scholar. Zealous, yes, and generous toward young artists and archeologists with both his time and his money. But finally his many varied interests served him poorly. He simply didn’t know enough about art or archeology. A friend wrote a sympathetic sketch of him after his death that declared, “There are antiquaries who are better informed than he was. He had neither the sagacity nor the critical perception of some erudite French, nor the vast knowledge of the Germans; nor did he have elegance and clarity as a writer.” And this was the opinion of a friend!

Forbin, like everyone else, felt some affection for Clarac, but the inscribed base and the problems it presented made Clarac’s presence at the museum inconvenient. Who could tell what he was going to do or say? And whatever he said could cause a problem. If he said the right thing about the base inscribed with the
name of a sculptor from Antioch—that is, that it didn’t belong to the statue—Clarac’s reputation was not weighty enough to make any difference. But if he said the wrong thing about the base—that is, that it
did
belong to the statue—his position as conservator of antiquities for the museum was important enough to raise questions about the base to the whole world. In any case he couldn’t be depended on to keep what the inscription said a secret. So Forbin simply froze him out. Assuming it was his duty, Clarac did write a brief paper on the statue intended for the king, but Forbin, who saw that Clarac’s paper did indeed say the wrong thing, pocketed it instead of sending it on.

For all Forbin could tell, this strategy worked perfectly. Now, in late April 1821, with the inscribed base having been secreted away or destroyed and the question about restoring the arms resolved at last, all that remained for Forbin to do about the Venus was to decide where to display her in the Louvre. Meanwhile he wrote to Clarac asking him to have a marble pedestal inscribed with the name of the statue. To Forbin this was simply a routine request, but the letter sent Clarac into a fury. He took it as the most degrading in the series of recent affronts by Forbin. Why was this happening? Clarac couldn’t understand it. As conservator of antiquities, he would have been the proper choice to write a paper, not Quatremère. Clarac had suffered patiently, perhaps in deference to Quatremère’s august position and reputation. But now, as if everything were normal, here was this letter from Forbin. In response, Clarac wrote:

In his reply, which did not come until May 24, a delay of several weeks, Forbin offered no explanation, and certainly no apology, for Clarac’s complaints about being excluded. He did say that it was “pure forgetfulness that you have not been informed of my decision.” Then he added bluntly, “It was I who ordered the restoration of two
Egyptian statues and I believe I remain completely authorized to take a similar measure every time it appears advisable to me.”

Forbin simply proceeded with his plans. A few days later, sometime in late May 1821, without any great ceremony to mark the event, perhaps because the king had not yet seen the statue, the Venus de Milo was displayed to the public at the Louvre.

Clarac was appalled. The statue had been put in the Salle de Diane, at the opposite end of the long corridor where the Venus now stands. During the Empire its name had been the Salle de l’Apollon, because this was where Denon had chosen to display the great
Apollo Belvedere. The Venus de Milo would assume that statue’s former place of glory. But the setting wasn’t right for her. Her back was to a wall, so the statue could not be seen from every angle. Indignant artists and connoisseurs complained to Clarac, and he agreed with them. Hadn’t the famous Venus of Knidos, the masterpiece of
Praxiteles, been displayed in its temple so she could be seen all around?

On the other hand, with the statue now on open display, the curtain of secrecy was drawn aside, and Clarac was free to study her as he wished. In a matter of weeks he published his own paper. Forbin could not pocket this work as he had Clarac’s earlier paper for the king. And, as Forbin suspected, Clarac was a
renegade. Without mentioning Quatremère by name, he disagreed with the scholar’s most important conclusions and rejected the Louvre’s orthodoxy about the statue, which Quatremère’s paper had defined.

Or, to be precise, he rejected almost all of it. He begins by mentioning the
Elgin marbles in England. They “represent an epoch in the history of art,” but the Louvre’s statue “that recalls to a great degree all their diverse beauty” creates an epoch, too, and one not less important. In fact, he concludes, many think it is an even finer work.

After this nod to French pride, Clarac begins his attack. He criticizes the placement of the statue in the Salle de Diane. Then, facing off directly with Quatremère, he insists that the statue could not be part of a group—“If it is part of a group, why is there no trace of Mars?” Furthermore, the inscribed base did belong to the statue. It was exactly the right size, and the fracture lines at the back and the sides fit precisely. It was not there by chance but was an integral part of the statue. The sculptor was neither
Phidias nor
Praxiteles, as much as he would like to say it was. Then he gets in a nice little dig. Those who claim it was by Praxiteles seem to be “so familiar with his style that one would be led to believe that they had seen him work.” No, the statue was by
Alexandros of Antioch, just as the broken base said. The inscription could not be a forgery, because forgers would have carved a name that would have added value, while this is not a famous name. But what difference does that make? The Apollo Belvedere was the work of an unknown sculptor, too. No, in his opinion it is a bad mistake to display the statue without the inscribed base.

Clarac called his paper “On the antique statue of Venus Victrix, with a drawing by Debay the younger.” And there on the cover of the pamphlet was Debay’s drawing. The fragment of left arm was attached at the shoulder and stuck straight out parallel to the ground. And against the left side of the statue’s base, fitting perfectly against the jagged edge, was the broken base with the inscription. The Greek letters were clearly legible. Discord
had thrown an apple into the party at the Louvre, although it would be almost eighty years before the trouble rose to the surface.