Gregory Curtis (21 page)

Salomon, who had no political office, had little of this ugliness directed at him personally. Instead he found himself at odds with some of the Jewish community. The Reinachs were not religious Jews. In fact, they favored assimilation based on what they saw as the affinity between revolutionary France and the Jewish race. Consequently, they were anti-Zionist. Salomon was vice president of the
Universal Israelite Alliance, which was pro-assimilation, and the founder in 1913 (with the composer
Darius Milhaud and the poet
Gustave Kahn) of the
Friends of Judaism, whose goal was to have both Jews and non-Jews study Judaism as a moral philosophy. But Salomon was attacked by the Zionist press and had to resign these positions.

Reinach had an antipathy for all religion. That and the shell that he drew around his erotic compulsions seem to have begun
during several months of personal crisis in the summer of 1877, when he was eighteen.

The previous fall he had entered the
Ecole Normale, an elite public all-male college. It was highly intellectual and competitive, and it was where Reinach began to concentrate less on philosophy and more on archeology. But the combination of youth and disorienting intellectualism made the years at the Ecole Normale a turbulent time for most of the students. They formed factions, and there was a lot of roughhousing among them. The dormitories were riddled with venereal disease, and the air reeked of testosterone.

Reinach was torn. He was then a short, slight young man who hardly filled out his clothes. His head was rather large for his body, and his eyes, beneath a large shock of curly black hair that fell over his forehead, looked sad and weary and made him appear older than he was. Searching for a higher world in art, in books, in his writing, and in his studies, he was, by his own avowal, at the same time desperate for friendship and tormented by the thought of homosexuality. Then too, lurking behind the lines of his letters from the period are oblique references to a devastating disappointment in love with a girl named
Alice Kohn.

At last, at the beginning of the summer of 1877, Reinach, succumbing to all that was swirling around him, suffered what he called a “mystical crisis” and converted suddenly to Catholicism. This was something of a fad at the time; several other classmates did the same thing. Depressed and frustrated by the intellectualism of the university, they idealized the simple faith of humble people. At Mass they gathered around the organ, singing loudly. Reinach took to ending his letters with “in Jesus Christ.” All of this left him even less popular with his classmates than before. He took refuge in
Saint Augustine and Pascal, to whom he would return from time to time for the rest of his life, even long after he had lost the faith of his adolescent conversion. But the scars from this desperate period remained. Having once
embraced religious belief only to lose his faith, he emerged not just skeptical of religion but feeling superior to it. And he continued to long for
Alice Kohn. Ten years later, while writing a brief autobiographical sketch, he mentioned without any introduction or comment that she had just gotten married.

In 1880 Reinach graduated first in his class. Almost immediately he left for
Athens despite a bout of bad health from his diabetes. In Athens he met
Charles-Joseph Tissot, France’s ambassador to Greece and president of the
French Hellenic Institute. He was thirty years to the day older than Reinach (they had the same birthday), but the two immediately became close. They were both melancholy men who shared a passion for antiquity, languages, and art. This trip and his virtual apprenticeship with Tissot would be the beginning for Reinach of four years of travel, study, and digs in Greece, Asia Minor, and northern Africa. He continued to publish books and papers on diverse subjects, but his main vocation as an archeologist had been set.

In late September 1880, Reinach visited
Melos. He was surprised and offended by the remarkably high prices the local people wanted for antiquities, much higher than on other islands. Three years earlier an oversized statue of Poseidon had been discovered. In a burst of enthusiasm Tissot had proclaimed the statue the “brother of the Venus de Milo.” He tried to acquire it for France but failed. It went instead to the museum in Athens, where it remains today. But the Poseidon statue had become linked in Reinach’s thinking to the Venus de Milo.

While at Melos, Reinach sought out the son of
Louis Brest, still in his position as French consul. He gave Reinach his biased account of the discovery of Venus with its inflated version of his father’s role. Reinach later did enough detailed research to learn not to credit the son’s account, but the visit shows Reinach’s great curiosity about the statue even here at the beginning of his career. Of the great scholars who wrote about the Venus de Milo, he was the only one who ever visited the island where she was found.

S
ALOMON
R
EINACH
and
Adolf Furtwängler developed an unlikely friendship. It began in 1893 when Reinach prominently reviewed Furtwängler’s magisterial
Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture
. In the
Gazette des Beaux-Arts
he proclaimed that
Masterpieces
was the book “the most rich in new ideas and the most provocative that has been written in our century on Greek art.” In the
Revue Critique
he called the work “the most important that has yet appeared on the history of antique art. One admires on almost each page the vast erudition of the author, the independence of his judgment, the incisive clearness of his style.”

Furtwängler was ecstatic that such glowing words had been written by a Frenchman and had appeared in French journals. He wrote to Reinach, and the two men became friends.

Furtwängler was five years older than Reinach, but they were both at similar places in their careers. Each was the leading archeologist in his country at a time when the field was still rather new, and archeologists were romantic and popular figures. Furtwängler had a lucrative position in Berlin. Reinach, with his mountain of publications rising almost daily, with his wealth and his prominent family, was on his way to becoming the conservator of national museums, director of the museum at Saint-Germainen-Laye, a professor at the school of the Louvre, a member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres and other learned societies, and the director for more than forty years of the
Revue Archéologique
, the leading journal of its kind in France.

Reinach and Furtwängler were frequent and indefatigable battlers in the scholarly journals, and even when they were together socially, neither could resist seizing an opening to prod the other. One pleasant summer evening in Paris in 1901, they were strolling along the Seine. Reinach, speaking in German, began explaining the latest English theories about the history of religions. Furtwängler knew little about the subtleties of English
anthropology, but he was enthralled, at least according to Reinach, and felt “as if, leaving a dark room, he had suddenly been flooded with light.” Reinach, not missing a beat, expressed no surprise at his effect on his listener. With no pretense of modesty, he replied that he always spoke “with the clarity which the superior education in France makes habitual.”

For his part, Furtwängler was ready to pounce whenever Reinach made a mistake, and in 1896, while the two men were in the heat of their disagreements about the Venus de Milo, Reinach made a colossal blunder.

Reinach was part of a committee of experts who advised the Louvre to buy the tiara of Saitapharnes, an ornate cap of gold covered with chains and scenes from
Homer in bas-relief. It was represented to bea Greco-Scythian relic from the third century
B.C.
The price was 200,000 francs, an extravagant amount for the time. The purchase was financed in part by a loan from
Salomon Reinach’s younger brother, Théodore, who had left politics and was now an archeologist himself. Salomon, alone among the members of the committee, had expressed some doubts about the authenticity of the tiara but had voted for the purchase nonetheless. The committee had been forced to decide in a hurry, since the seller used the clever ploy of announcing that if there was any delay, he would leave for England and sell the tiara to the
British Museum.

Reinach had seen Furtwängler at the Louvre while the purchase was being considered and asked his opinion of the relic. Furtwängler was evasive. After the purchase was completed and the seller had retreated back to Russian Georgia, Furtwängler published a polemical paper claiming that the tiara was a blatant forgery. Both Salomon and
Théodore Reinach defended the tiara vigorously and were able to refute the specific arguments Furtwängler had made. But the extravagant price and the heat of the controversy attracted the interest of the press. In the end, although his arguments weren’t convincing in themselves, Furtwängler’s intuition was right. The tiara was a forgery. The forger himself, a man from Odessa named
Israel Rouchomowsky, who had received only a fraction of the seller’s fee of 200,000
francs, arrived in Paris and proudly demonstrated his skill at creating what appeared to be ancient treasures.

The Louvre lost its money. Since the forger and the tiara’s two strongest defenders had been Jewish, the anti-Semitic press seized the opportunity to add their repellent attacks to what had already become an overwrought debate. They chose Salomon as their specific target. Reinach, who had been known since his teenage years as a genius, was ridiculed as an imbecile. Although his friends on the committee urged him to defend himself by revealing the doubts he had had, Reinach refused and took the abuse in silence. He did not want to appear to be shifting the blame from himself to others. This admirable conduct cost him dearly. Because of his silence, he never quite lived the incident down. The affair of the tiara of Saitapharnes was played over again even in his obituaries more than thirty years later.

R
EINACH
wrote about the Venus de Milo not long after visiting
Melos in 1880, but his first important essay on it appeared in May 1890 in the
Gazette des Beaux-Arts
. He began with a statement, emphasized by his own italics, that Furtwängler would later quote slyly in his own work on the statue: “I repeat today what I wrote ten years ago:
The Venus de Milo is a mystery
.” The rest of the article, in which he summarized the story of the discovery as well as the various restorations that had been proposed over the years, is important for one reason: Reinach placed himself exactly in the mainstream of French thinking about the statue by insisting that the Venus de Milo was created in the fourth century
B.C.
, during the classical age of Greek art. He too had been seduced by the desperate desire of the French, as strong in 1890 as it had been when the statue was discovered seven decades earlier, that the Venus de Milo was classical and
not
, as some heretical voices with German accents liked to argue, Hellenistic.

The most dramatic piece of evidence that the statue was
Hellenistic was the base with the inscription “…  andros son of Menides citizen of Antioch of Meander made the statue.” Reinach denied that this inscription belonged with the Venus de Milo. His reasoning was both original and peculiar. He said that he had concluded that the place where the statue was found was an ancient limestone kiln. Reinach makes this supposition without any proof. It was merely his ingenious means of explaining away the inscribed base: It and the Venus were there to be burned as random pieces of marble.

With the base disposed of, Reinach directly confronts the question of the date of the statue. He says that from political history we know that
Melos was an Athenian colony from 416 to 404
B.C
. From art history we know that “the style of the Venus de Milo is that of attic sculptors of the same period, that is to say of the students and successors of
Phidias.” He knows, he says, that “today it is fashionable in Germany to attribute the Venus to a much more recent era,” but this is due to a bias for denigration “from which even our masterpieces themselves do not escape.” No, he says, the “analogy of style, of execution, of sentiment that one notes between the Venus de Milo and the sculptures of the pediments of the
Parthenon [i.e., the
Elgin marbles] suffice to refute every hypothesis that would place the artist of our statue more recently than the first half of the fourth century
B.C.
” Though he admits he can’t prove that mathematically, “taste has its truths, like reason and the heart.” This is not science or even art history. It’s wishful thinking, exactly the same sort of wishful thinking displayed more than two generations earlier by Quatremère de Quincy when he wrote that the statue must have come from the hand or the school of
Praxiteles.

F
URTWÄNGLER
had Reinach in his sights from the beginning of his chapter on the Venus de Milo in
Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture
,
published three years later. To a modern reader,
Masterpieces
is a bit like an archeological ruin: an impressive, inspiring, even intimidating relic of an age now past, an age that believed that with enough hard work and a little inspiration it was possible to know everything. Furtwängler, ever the brilliant cataloger, here attempted nothing less than to write a history of the development of Greek sculpture by examining detail by detail the individual innovations of the greatest masters of antiquity. It was a conscious attempt to write a book that would rival and supplant Winckelmann.

Such a sweeping endeavor had always been considered impossible, because the works of the great masters had all disappeared. They were known only through Roman copies or from descriptions in the writings of ancient travelers. Furtwängler tried to prove that these Roman statues were often direct copies of Greek originals, not just loose versions of them, and that they were copies of the most esteemed works of ancient times, for why would a status-conscious Roman commission a copy of an inferior work? As Furtwängler wrote in his preface, the Roman copies