Gregory Curtis (18 page)

Ravaisson sculpted many versions of the Venus de Milo and the Borghese statue standing together. He tried them turned at different angles to each other and with Venus’s arms in different poses. He had a plaster cast of the most convincing arrangement made in the true size of the two statues. The male stands straight while Venus is in three-quarter profile to his right. Her left foot is behind her right. Her right arm comes over to his right side, her fingers separated. Her left hand holds the apple and rests lightly on his right shoulder.

All his life, from the time Delacroix heard him speak at the Louvre until his final philosophical writings in the year before his death, Ravaisson wanted to show that the ancient world could be reconciled with Christianity, that the Greeks themselves were almost Christians even though they lived before Christ. By grouping the Venus de Milo with a statue of Theseus, Ravaisson could show that the Venus, as he had reconstructed it, with the immortal woman and the mortal man in a moment of tender intimacy, was an “image expressing a divine grace that is going to look for humanity in order to unite with it—a conception that was not foreign to Judaism, where Jehovah seems to seek out the elected nation, and that the Christian religion was to carry, after paganism and Judaism, to a new height.”

From here Ravaisson passes even further into the imaginary. He tries to determine the prototype for the Venus de Milo and chooses a statue known as the Venus of the Gardens by either
Phidias or one of his pupils. It was created in the fifth century
B.C
. in Athens. We know of it only through references in ancient writings. Ravaisson surmises that the Venus de Milo together with Theseus was a version of the Venus of the Gardens done during the time of Alexander—the fourth century
B.C
.—specifically to grace the theater in Melos.

Ravaisson weaves an elaborate rationale for his choice, although it is undoubtedly wrong. For one thing, no ancient author mentions either Mars or Theseus together with the Venus of the Gardens. Ravaisson himself dismisses this objection airily, but the point remains.

Ravaisson was too isolated from the world to understand or even to suspect that during his lifetime
archeology had changed. It was no longer an avocation for scholars with an appreciation for ancient art and some knowledge of classical languages; now it was a profession that required training and experience and that aspired to become a science.
Salomon Reinach, who by 1890 had become the leading archeologist in France, reviewed Ravaisson’s paper. He treated the old man gently and praised him for disproving the still current story of the fight on the beach in
Melos. But, Reinach says, the grouping with the Borghese Mars derives “less from proven facts than from personal impressions and judgments.” Even worse, there “are errors, slight no doubt, but too numerous to allow the critic to conceal them.” He then lists, in a withering footnote, some twenty errors.

Adolf Furtwängler, Reinach’s counterpart in
Germany, also reviewed Ravaisson’s paper. He saw no need to be gentle with a man, no matter how aged or distinguished, whom he thought to be simply wrong. Furtwängler gives Ravaisson credit for proving that the fight on the shore was a myth, but the rest of the paper had “only the value of a dilettante’s fantasy.” The grouping with the Borghese Mars is “certainly one of the most absurd and unfortunate of all restorations.” And he thought Ravaisson’s ignorance was staggering: “A large role is played in Ravaisson’s conjectures by the ring that Theseus wears on two famous vases. Ravaisson unites it with the ring of the Mars Borghese,
but overlooks the fact that the ring was a fashionable touch during a particular period of vase painting, even occurring on some figures of Silenus, so it has absolutely no special significance.”

R
AVAISSON
was eighty-one in 1892 when he wrote his final paper on the statue. He lived for eight more years. He was lucid to the end, but his interests had returned to metaphysics. He retreated increasingly into his speculations, to the point that he couldn’t recognize his two adored granddaughters at first if they surprised him on the street as he returned home from his office. He still had his luminous blue eyes and dressed in bright colors, and his work in philosophy had influenced the next generation of French and German thinkers. As an archeologist, however, he had thought himself into irrelevance. His archeological papers were based on deduction from a few premises—the way a philosopher reasons—rather than on research and deduction from the proven facts, as a scientist reasons. In the end, his only permanent contributions to archeology are not his theories or his reconstructions but the important facts fate placed in his way: the wedges between the two halves of the Venus de Milo and Voutier’s sketches.

The future belonged to the next generation, specifically to
Salomon Reinach in France and Adolf Furtwängler in Germany. Furtwängler had concluded his critique of Ravaisson’s paper by saying, “I must decline further comment on questions addressing the Venus de Milo itself, because an essay by me on the subject is currently on the press.” When that essay appeared a few months later, the future had arrived. Reinach responded with papers of his own, and classical archeology, once the domain of titled art connoisseurs and gentle philosophers, became a contact sport.

O
F ALL
the peoples of Europe, the Germans of the nineteenth century were by far the most obsessed with classical Greece. And they had a particular, almost proprietary interest in the Venus de Milo, in part because they thought it was rightfully theirs. In 1817 Prince Ludwig of Bavaria, who was passionate about classical antiquity, had bought the ruined theater in
Melos. After the discovery of the Venus de Milo in 1820, he claimed the statue. He was not convinced by the French government’s reply that his claim was invalid because the statue had been found near—but not on—his property. After that, the statue had an aura of lost love for the Germans. It was still visible, yet forever out of reach. The romantic poet
Heinrich Heine used to talk to her in the Louvre. During his last visit to see the statue before leaving Paris he burst into tears.

But Heine was a poet. German archeologists, disappointed that
Germany couldn’t have the statue, became skeptical of its real value. As a group they put the date of the statue in the first century
B.C.
, during the supposedly inferior Hellenistic times, and not during the fourth-century classical period, as the French insisted. The Germans were in effect devaluing the jewel of the French collections, although that didn’t stop German scholars
from proposing various reconstructions.
Christoph Hasse, a fellow at the anatomical institute of the
University of Breslau, tried to determine the position of the missing arms by close observation of the muscles in the back and shoulder. He concluded that she was removing her robe with her right hand and loosening her hair with her left as she was about to enter the sea. Other scholars proposed that she was holding a shield or a mirror and was lost in her own reflection. A scholar named
Viet Valentin, after pondering every square millimeter of the statue, decided that she was recoiling while warding off a male god who had surprised her at her bath.

These reconstructions all seem unlikely today, but they were dutifully discussed until
Adolf Furtwängler appeared. His career had the effect of shoving all that had come before into the distant background.

In 1872, when Furtwängler was nineteen, his father sent him to study at Leipzig, an important intellectual center at the time. Furtwängler was bored with his classes, but he did discover a Leipzig museum with plaster casts of classical statues. In those days, before photographs and widespread travel made seeing art relatively easy, museums everywhere in Europe filled their rooms with plaster casts of masterpieces from the classical age. Wandering among these casts made Furtwängler feel ignorant and uncomprehending of even their basic forms. He couldn’t stand that feeling and, as it turned out, spent the rest of his life trying to eradicate it.

In 1873 he transferred to the
University of Munich, where he studied with
Heinrich von Brunn, a venerable founding father of German archeology. Brunn found himself with a student who had a feverish enthusiasm, immense energy, an unrivaled capacity for work, high intelligence, and, best of all, a visual memory so vast and so acute it was unique in the history of archeology. As Brunn put it, “He is all fire.”

While studying with Brunn, Furtwängler began what was to become the bedrock of his work throughout his career. He
was by instinct a great cataloger. He began by creating detailed personal files containing entries on every piece of antiquity in the collections around Munich. He cataloged large items, such as statues and urns, as well as the smallest pottery shards, coins, and carved gems. His thesis under Brunn in 1876—
Eros in Greek Vases
—had also been a kind of catalog. But he began to understand the real potential contained in his systematic sorting two years later in a dusty storeroom in Athens.

Furtwängler, who had been traveling and studying in Italy and Greece on a stipend from the German Archeological Institute, had immersed himself in a daunting project involving pottery found during
Heinrich Schliemann’s
excavations at Mycenae. Schliemann was the flamboyant self-proclaimed archeologist
who, convinced of the literal truth of
Homer’s
Iliad
, had discovered the ruins of
Troy in northwestern Turkey, along with a hoard of golden objects he called the
treasure of Priam. He then turned to Mycenae in Greece, where, to the amazement of the world, he found graves at the bottom of deep shafts, including a death mask he called the
mask of Agamemnon. Neither the attribution to Priam nor that to Agamemnon was accurate, but there was no questioning the importance of the finds or the vast popular interest they created.

At Mycenae Schliemann had found a huge amount of pottery that was sent to a storeroom in
Athens, where it was piled indiscriminately. Furtwängler confronted this wasteland of old clay early in 1878. With nothing to go on but his energy, visual memory, and genius for seeing parallels and connections among even widely separated objects, he began to sort the pottery by such simple criteria as color, shape, and firing techniques. After that initial classification, other more subtle and interesting connections began to emerge. Finally, some years later, as he continued to study the pottery—Furtwängler always had eight or ten difficult projects going at the same time—he was able to establish what he called the “evolutionary stages of ornamentation,” which proceeded from clearly drawn natural objects to intricate abstractions. This timeline of designs made it possible to date later finds and to see a changing flow of taste, ideas, events, heroes, and divinities.

While Furtwängler was still working in Athens,
Ernst Curtius, the most famous archeologist in Germany at the time, sent for him to join the German
excavations at Olympia. The ruins at this site of the ancient
Olympic games beckoned to lovers of Greece, and excavating there had been a dream in Germany since Winckelmann. Surely here, where for centuries the Greeks had met for the sacred games, the greatest artifacts of the Greek genius must lie buried in the rubble. The Germans hoped that the sculpture in the temples at Olympia might surpass even the
Elgin marbles and the Venus de Milo.

Curtius had recruited Furtwängler to Olympia to help with
an awkward situation. It wasn’t that the excavations had come up dry. On the contrary, many thousands of objects had been found. A similar discovery today would be in newspapers and magazines with dazzling photographs and ecstatic quotes from scientists about their good fortune. But for Curtius and, more important, for the royal family and the German government who sponsored the dig, and for the German people who had taken Curtius’s romantic history of Greece to their hearts, the finds were not of the right sort at all.