Gregory Curtis (2 page)

This Venus is clearly a big woman, but how big? In fact, from head to toe, she is six feet seven inches tall. Her right foot—twelve and a half inches long—is enormous. Her hips are so wide she looks as if she has had several children. Rodin described her stomach as “immense like the sea! It is the rhythmic beauty of the sea without end.” Yet she seems almost weightless, as if this ton of marble could move effortlessly through the air. As you look at her, six-seven doesn’t seem any more likely than either five-nine or eight feet.

And how old is she? She is not an adolescent, she is not a virgin, and she is not a crone. She could be twenty-five or thirty or fifty. Her children could be infants, or they could be old enough to have children of their own. So while most people would describe the statue as “realistic,” the most obvious characteristics of a real person—height, weight, age—turn out to be elusive.

As you walk about viewing the Venus de Milo from one side and the other, she changes. Since we are accustomed to seeing her in reproductions viewed straight from the front, the changes are quite striking. From her right side she seems almost like a pillar. Her huge foot is flat on the ground, and a line goes straight up from it to her right hip and then to her right shoulder. Her leg, barely suggested beneath the folds of the drapery, is straight and bears most of her weight. Her thick hip is locked. Her stomach and her waist are also thick. She seems planted in the ground, and since she is looking away toward her left, her big hip, stomach, and waist are what defines her. They all speak of her fecundity and of her sexuality. From this perspective she is as human as a goddess can be. You can see in stone a profound truth of Greek art and religion: We share our sexuality with the gods.

Her drapery is falling down around her hip, but that doesn’t concern her, because her concentration is elsewhere. Even her hair, gathered in the back, has begun to unravel. It’s almost a shock to realize that, hanging free, her hair would be long enough to reach most of the way down her back. It’s easy to think that she must always be exactly the way she is in the
moment captured in the statue. But it’s not true—that’s the shock. What mood would she be in when she let her hair fall down her back? The gathered hair beginning to unravel reveals a tantalizing glimpse into her interior life, just as her partially fallen drapery does. As with many masterpieces, the statue that appears so open, even blatant, is instead filled with suggestion and withheld knowledge.

From the left side she seems not tied to the earth but ready to ascend from it. Her raised left foot makes her appear able to spring effortlessly into space. But even from this side we are excluded from her. All her concentration is on something, now invisible, that is just in front of her. What is it? Who is she, after all? How did she come to be here on a pedestal in an alcove at the end of a long corridor in the Louvre? And what is it about her that attracts and holds the attention of the world?

O
LIVIER
V
OUTIER
was twenty-three and an ensign in the French navy when he first set foot on Greek soil. He had a high forehead, black hair, and a carefully trimmed mustache that shot straight up in a waxed point at each end. His slender, athletic build was close to being slight, but he was possessed by a romantic fervor that made him prideful and gave him a forceful appearance. He wore a well-tailored uniform that completed the picture he presented of precise military sheen. In fact, he loved wearing uniforms. Later in his life, Voutier had a weakness for the gold braids, ribbons, and medals he would win during his years of combat. He would pose for portraits wearing all his medals and with a brace of pistols tucked into his broad belt.

It was spring in the year 1820. Voutier was assigned to the
Estafette
, a two-masted warship, which for more than a month had been at anchor in the magnificent harbor on the island of Melos, a piece of rock halfway between Crete and mainland Greece. Unfortunately, to most tastes, the harbor was the only thing about Melos that was magnificent. The Greek islands in the Aegean are often idyllic, but Melos was not. Long stays in the harbor there were bleak exercises in boredom, and the
Estafette
had nothing to do but wait for orders.

Fortunately, Voutier had an escape from the boredom. He was interested in what was then a completely new and unformed science: archeology. On April 8 he left the
Estafette
with two sailors carrying shovels and picks. They were going to dig into the hillsides of Melos for whatever remnants of the glories of Greece and Rome they could find.

In fact, Voutier was looking for more than that. He was a young man in search of a cause, and Greece was where he found
it. He saw the Greeks, heirs of classical civilization, demoralized and humiliated under the rule of the Ottoman
Turks. Just a year after the long anchor at Melos he abruptly resigned his commission in the French navy and joined the Greek war for independence. He became a hero of the struggle.

That morning on Melos it wasn’t difficult to find the most promising place to dig. The ruins of an ancient theater, as well as stone walls and pieces of broken columns, were still clearly visible on an escarpment on the side of the island’s tallest hill. Voutier and the sailors began to dig there near the remains of a wall and circular tower that had once defended the gate of the ancient town. They found a seemingly endless number of marble fragments, as well as a bust, a carved foot, and two nicely chiseled statues missing their heads, hands, and feet.

As Voutier and the two sailors were digging, another man, a local farmer as it turned out, was also working just twenty paces away trying to remove the stones from an ancient wall to use in a structure he was building on his farm. Voutier, glancing over that way, noticed that the man had stopped digging for the moment and was staring at something in a niche he had uncovered in the wall. His posture was curious enough that Voutier went to look himself.

As Voutier drew near, he could see that the farmer was busy again, covering something with dirt. Peering into the darkness of the chamber where the farmer was working, Voutier saw a statue, or at least the upper half of one, lying on its side and still partly buried. Its odd shape made it useless as a building block, so the farmer had decided to cover it over. Voutier gave him a small bribe to dig up the statue instead. It didn’t take long to push aside the accumulated dirt and stones and prop the object up. It was the nude upper body of a woman. The tip of her nose and the small bun of hair gathered at the back of her head were both broken off. There was an ugly hole in her right side that Voutier assumed was the result of some crude restoration from long ago. Stains, nicks, and scrapes, evidently from the time when it had first fallen over, covered the surface of the statue.
But despite these imperfections, Voutier sensed from the first glance that he was seeing something extraordinary. This torso was more glorious than anything he could have hoped to find when he set out that morning with the two sailors and a few picks and shovels.

Voutier insisted that the farmer search for the lower half of the statue, but his insistence revealed his excitement. Now the farmer wanted more money to continue digging. Voutier paid. He joined the farmer inside the niche, an oval enclosure about five yards wide. The walls were cut stone and had once been painted in a pattern that was still faintly visible. Overhead was an arched roof.

After a little digging here and there amid the rubble on the floor, the farmer found the lower half of the statue and brought it up out of the dirt. But the two parts couldn’t be reassembled because a large section missing from the right side made it impossible to balance the top half on the lower. Yet another bribe persuaded the farmer to continue digging, but this time, since the missing piece was considerably smaller than the other two, the search took more work and time. When the farmer wanted to quit, Voutier calmly prodded him until he finally discovered the missing middle section.

At last Voutier and the farmer, perhaps with help from the two sailors, were able to place the top half of the statue on the lower. When they slid the middle section between the two larger pieces, the statue balanced, and they were able to see it as it was intended: a woman, nude from the waist up, her legs covered in wet drapery that was falling from her hips. This was of course the statue that would become known to the world as the Venus de Milo.

The farmer’s only interest in the statue was what money he could get for it. But Voutier, though he had to contain himself as best he could, knew that this was an experience granted to very few. He was in the presence of a masterpiece that no one had seen for almost two thousand years. Here, in a buried niche on a minor island, was a work of art that was a culminating expression
of the Greek genius. It had been reborn before his eyes, and now it stood there in full glory for him to contemplate. Voutier later wrote a single sentence to describe these first few moments: “Those who have seen the Venus de Milo are able to understand my stupefaction.”

As soon as he had recovered from his astonishment, Voutier turned his attention to practical matters. To prevent a fall, the top half was removed and placed on the ground beside the lower half. Now it was time to try to claim the statue before anyone else was able to, preferably even before anyone else knew about it. Voutier hurried to the small town at the top of the hill about fifteen minutes from the ruins. There he found the only representative of the French government on the island, a viceconsul named
Louis Brest.

After about thirty minutes Voutier arrived back at the niche with Vice-consul Brest in tow. While Voutier was gone, the farmer, whose name was
Yorgos, had had enough time to make a thorough search of the small enclosure. He found a marble hand holding an apple, a piece of a badly mutilated arm, and two herms. Herms are quadrangular pillars about three feet high with a carved head at the top. Their purpose is no longer clear, but apparently they were usually used as some sort of boundary marker. One herm had the head of a bearded man, and the other the head of a young man. Each one was standing in an inscribed base.

Voutier had brought a sketch pad and a pencil with him on his digging expedition, and now he set to work on what would turn out to be four drawings: one of the upper half of the statue, one of the lower half, and one of each herm in its inscribed base. He copied the two inscriptions clearly enough to be read. His plan was to use the drawings to convince the captain of the
Estafette
to take the statue on board.

While he was drawing Voutier prodded Brest to buy the statue. Yorgos had decided he wanted four hundred piasters for it, about the price of a good donkey. Brest was a rotund, methodical person, thirty-one years old, who tried to maintain
the dignity of his office by wearing a blue uniform with gold braid. The sudden exertion of getting to the site, the close atmosphere inside the small niche, the ancient dust that had just been disturbed and was still floating in the air, the play of light and shadows on the statue and the oddly painted brick walls—all that was too much for Vice-consul Brest. Besides, he had no official budget. If he were to buy the statue, he would have to do so with his own money and then hope to be reimbursed by the French government. While that might happen, it also might not. “Are you
sure
,” he whispered to Voutier, “that it’s worth that much? Please don’t make me risk losing my money.”