Gregory Curtis (23 page)

There were other reasons beyond the two inscriptions to link the Venus and the Poseidon. Both statues had been sculpted in two halves that joined just below the waist, and in each case the line of juncture was concealed by drapery. Both had been discovered in a kind of niche, and although the Poseidon was taller than the Venus, just as gods were always taller than goddesses in Greek sculpture, the two statues were carved in the same scale. They were not by the same sculptor. The Poseidon was artistically inferior to the Venus, but otherwise the similarities were too strong to overlook.

Buttressed by the two inscriptions to Theodoridas in fourth-century characters, Reinach persisted in dating both statues to that period, but he was uneasy about this conclusion. The headless statue of Theodoridas was similar in style to the Poseidon. Other scholars, French scholars among them, thought both these statues came from the Hellenistic era, around 100
B.C
. or, maddeningly, exactly the period in which Furtwängler placed the Venus de Milo.

Reinach couldn’t see his way out of the confusion. “The question of the date of our statue,” he concludes somewhat
lamely, “must be entirely left to the judgment of historians of art.”

The following year, 1898, Reinach had progressed far enough in his thinking to publish his own reconstruction of the Venus de Milo. He still insisted that the statue had been found in a limekiln, and he believed that the evidence of the two inscriptions mentioning Theodoridas meant that the Venus was originally in a group with Poseidon from the fourth century. Placing the statue with Poseidon meant that the Venus de Milo wasn’t Venus at all. Instead, Reinach said she was Amphitrite, the wife of Poseidon. Since the statue of the god shows him standing with a trident in his right hand, Reinach places the Venus to his left, holding a trident in her left hand. This, he says, explains the direction of her gaze—she is looking out to sea “as if she wanted to sound the horizon.”

Two years later, in 1900, Reinach got an unexpected confirmation for at least some of his conjectures. The base of the bearded herm with the name Theodoridas inscribed on it, as Voutier had drawn, suddenly reappeared. It had been in the Louvre all along.

For almost seventy years the base had been attached to a small, insignificant funerary monument. This absurd reconstruction had been stuck under a staircase along with other presumed junk from antiquity. There it rested until two conservators, who had taken it upon themselves to put some order to the mess under the stairway, realized to their great surprise that here was the base inscribed to Theodoridas that Salomon Reinach had been writing about.

The base confirmed every one of Reinach’s suppositions. The lettering was in a fourth-century style. And Voutier had indeed mistakenly duplicated two letters in the inscription when he made his sketch. The inscription did read “Theodoridas, son of Laistratos” and was identical to the name on the base of the headless statue found with the statue of Poseidon.

And the base offered a spectacular proof that Furtwängler was wrong. He had insisted that Voutier had stuck the two
herms into the bases for purposes of his drawing. Why, Reinach had always demanded in his papers, would Voutier do such a thing? Now that one of the inscribed bases had been found, it was a simple matter to place the bearded herm inside it to see if it fit. If it did, that would prove that the two belonged together and that Voutier had not arbitrarily, as Furtwängler claimed, put them together.

The result was so important that when the discovery of the base was announced at a meeting of the Académie des Inscriptions, plaster casts of both the bearded herm and the Theodoridas base were on hand. At the dramatic moment, after the conflicting theories of Furtwängler and Reinach had been carefully explained, a curator from the Louvre slid the cast of the bearded herm into the cast of the inscribed base and—
voilà!—
the fit was perfect.

F
URTWÄNGLER
did not meekly submit to this trouncing. In a paper he wrote for the
Academy of Bavaria in 1902, he came roaring back full of assurance and contemptuous of anyone who would question him. And now that Reinach had had his day, there was new information that supported Furtwängler’s theories.

In 1900 and again in 1902 the French scholar
Etienne Michon, adjunct conservator of antiquities at the Louvre, published articles in the
Revue des Etudes Grecques
that were the result of many months of diligent research in maritime records, Louvre archives, published memoirs, and private family papers concerning the discovery of the Venus de Milo and its transportation to the Louvre. In the course of these researches he discovered information about the purchase of a statue of Hermes, signed by a sculptor named
Antiphanes, found on
Melos in 1827. The statue came from one of three niches in an ancient wall. The first was the one in which the Venus had been discovered; at
its entrance an inscription said that a man named
Bakkhios had dedicated the niche to Hermes and Hercules. The second niche, about twenty paces away, contained the statue of Hermes signed by Antiphanes. In the third niche, another twenty paces down the wall, only the feet remained of the statue that once stood there, but an inscription revealed that it had been a statue of a man named
Hagesimenes, whose father and brother had dedicated the niche to Hermes and Hercules.

These two gods were the patrons of gymnasiums. According to Furtwängler, their ubiquitous presence made it clear that this had once been the wall of a gymnasium, and that the Venus de Milo had been displayed in her niche as part of the decorations. Thus, he concludes in triumph, she had been found in situ, as he had maintained from the start, and not in a limekiln, as Reinach continued to believe.

The fact that the bearded herm fit in the newly rediscovered base didn’t impress Furtwängler at all. “These two little herms,” he said, “simple offerings to the god of the gymnasium, derive from an époque older than the gymnasium of Melos. Later, when the niches had been constructed and provided with large statues from the second to the first centuries
B.C.
, the herms were employed as decoration of the niche dedicated by Bakkhios.” And he continued to insist that Voutier had put one of the herms in the base with the signature where it didn’t belong. That base, Furtwängler still defiantly believed, belonged to the statue and gave the name of its sculptor and, because of the reference to Antioch, its true date.

Salomon Reinach took all this as a direct, personal affront. He could hardly control his rage. “I admit,” he wrote in a paper he published in response a few months later, “that I sometimes have trouble arguing coolly with Mr. Furtwängler. Even when he is wrong, he has a passion to be always right that would put the patience of a saint to a harsh test. That said, I am going to be very objective.” Reinach, it’s fair to say, failed to achieve this goal.

Furtwängler now dated the bearded herm with the
Theodoridas inscription to the end of the fifth century
B.C.
Reinach wrote,
“He was previously content to say that it was ‘older than the Empire’; I am the one who determined the date.” Furtwängler now put the two herms in different eras. Reinach retaliated: “He thought formerly that the two herms were contemporary; I am the one who corrected him.” And when Furtwängler repeated his belief in his reconstruction with Venus resting her left forearm on a pillar (“Of which,” Reinach added in a parenthesis, “no one has found the slightest fragment!”), Reinach smugly added a footnote: “Mr. Furtwängler, however, must know that I have demonstrated the impossibility of this tendentious restitution.” But he could not stop there: “What a shame that the tribunal in The Hague does not settle scientific disputes! I would readily agree to a meeting before judges, who wouldn’t be archeologists but rule by the simple lights of common sense and by what is most likely. He would be given a grueling time.”

With all that out of his system, Reinach then calmly explained the crux of their differences. They agreed that the statue of Poseidon was Hellenistic, which means it dated from the first or second century
B.C
. Furtwängler thought the Venus came from the same period but that the Poseidon had no relation to it. For him, they were two separate works. Reinach thought that the Venus was really an Amphitrite from the Greek classical period, the fourth century
B.C.
, and was part of a group with the Poseidon.

But then how could Reinach agree that the Poseidon was Hellenistic? By pure invention. He contended that the original Poseidon had indeed been created in the fourth century, but it had been damaged or destroyed and “replaced by a mediocre copy from the Roman era.” He had dropped his limekiln theory without a word; the three niches with statues in a row and the dedications to Hermes and Hercules were too strong proof that the location had been a gymnasium.

Reinach concluded by saying he hoped someday to convince Furtwängler, whom, in a conciliatory spirit, he calls his “eminent friend and contradictor.” Reinach failed in this goal as well. Neither man ever retreated from his position.

I
NSTEAD
they apparently agreed to disagree about the Venus de Milo. Since each was hyperactively busy and each was confident he had solved the mystery, the men resumed other projects. Furtwängler’s second great work after
Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture
was
Of Antique Gems
. He was attracted to ancient carved gemstones because enough had survived to allow a thorough historical analysis. The first two volumes reproduce and discuss thousands of carved stones, which are cataloged according to content, form, and chronology. The third volume is a historical survey that one critic called the “phenomenal achievement of its marvelously productive century.”

In 1900 Furtwängler had also begun re-excavating a temple on the island of Aegina that had been bought by the same King Ludwig of Bavaria who owned the theater on
Melos when the Venus was discovered. Furtwängler made important finds, and the digs continued. In the fall of 1907 he traveled to Aegina again despite suffering from a fever. When his condition deteriorated, he was taken to a hospital in
Athens, where, after several days of intense pain, he died on October 11, at age fifty-four. The city of Athens dedicated an honorary grave to him over which a Sphinx found on Aegina stands watch.

Reinach never again found such a worthy combatant among archeologists. In the obituary he wrote for the
Revue Archéologique
, he called Furtwängler “the greatest archeologist of our times.… We remain, almost incredulous, by the side of this prematurely opened grave, astonished, even after so many proofs, that an untimely death was able to strike down this superb athlete and to make him so soon what he will always remain for our science—a hero.” Later he added, “No one has inherited his great and legitimate authority.”

Reinach lived until 1932. In the
Revue Archéologique
he continued to report on any new papers or theories about the Venus de
Milo. To his dismay, the story of the scuffle on the beach on
Melos continued to live, and Reinach continued dutifully but wearily to contradict it. Nor were any of the more responsible scholarly papers of any great interest.

His later years were marred by what became known as the
Glozel affair. Numerous carvings and tablets, apparently from the
Iron Age, were found near the French village of that name. They bore little resemblance to other Iron Age discoveries, and most experts believed they were fakes. Reinach, however, visited Glozel. Convinced that the finds were genuine, he became their most prominent and vocal champion. Eventually, though, as his health declined and he saw so much other work going unfinished, the Glozel controversy wearied him, and he complained about it sadly to
Liane de Pougy. (The question of Glozel remains unresolved. Most archeologists still believe the artifacts are forgeries, although some modern chemical dating techniques tend to support their authenticity.)

As his health deteriorated, mostly because of complications from diabetes, Reinach could walk only with help, and even then his pain was agonizing. Still, he attended scholarly meetings when the discussion was something he considered important. Finally he was confined to his bed.
Bernard Berenson visited him. “Old Salomon,” he wrote, “looked like a dying eagle, really beautiful, but very sad, and I fear not resigned.”

One day in the spring of 1932 he sent his car for Liane de Pougy. It was the one time she was permitted in the home of Madame Reinach. Liane “saw him lying on a sofa, depressed, unhappy, his fine prophet’s face scarred with pain. When I came into the room he could hardly restrain his tears.” The room was tidy, fresh, bright, and lined with books in perfect order. Salomon had covered his legs, which were now completely useless, with a woolen rug. His forced inactivity made him frustrated and angry. Occasionally the pain that shot through him made him groan despite himself. After a short while Madame Reinach joined them. When Liane left, Salomon managed a smile and secretly blew her a kiss from his fingertips. Outside
Madame Reinach gave her a bouquet of lilacs and tulips. In September he wrote to Liane, “I can say that, for the first time, life itself is a burden to me and I would happily take a ticket for another sphere.”

S
ALOMON
R
EINACH
died on November 4, 1932. With his passing, more than a century of scholarship about the Venus de Milo came to a close. No one since has written anything approaching the importance of the work of Quatremère, Ravaisson, Furtwängler, or Reinach. And certainly no one has matched the passion of those men. Confronted with the questions inspired by the Venus de Milo—what is it? who made it and when? what was the original position of the arms?—scholars of the nineteenth century were eager to confront the void and propose answers.

Such audacity carries risks with it, and in one sense the work of these venerable scholars was a failure, partly because their thinking was clouded by nationalism, French or German. But it is fair to say that those same scholars would be dismayed by the work of their modern counterparts: It would seem cool, analytic, even timid when compared to theirs. Nationalism has dropped away from contemporary scholarship, only to be replaced by other political agendas based on gender, sexuality, or, as we saw in the contemporary writing about the supposed fight on the beach in
Melos, a desperate desire to discover victims of Western culture. The older scholars had an enthusiasm for the statue, almost a gratitude for its presence in their lives. Their appreciation shone through their prose even at its most academic. Contemporary scholars curb their enthusiasm, if indeed they have any. They want to appear superior to what
Geoffrey Grigson in
The Goddess of Love
called “that rather chill giantess in the Louvre, the Venus de Milo; by whom most of us now are vaguely unmoved, I suspect, or even repelled.” The result is that little of originality or of particular importance has
appeared since Reinach and Furtwängler’s Olympian quarrels in the scholarly journals of their day.