Gregory Curtis (24 page)

Contemporary scholars, when they need to confront the Venus de Milo with more than a snide remark, turn to the authoritative source closest to hand, and that turns out to be Furtwängler. His reconstruction, with the goddess resting her left arm on a pillar, appears repeatedly, sometimes credited and sometimes not, to the exclusion of any other reconstruction. His triumph over his rivals in France—and in Germany, for that matter—is complete; but it is a triumph by default rather than by carefully considered judgment of the evidence.

With all the evidence taken into account, it becomes clear that Furtwängler’s contribution
was
immense, although he made his share of errors. But, free of nationalism and of modern academic politics, and with all the evidence at hand, perhaps we ourselves can assume some of the nineteenth-century vigor and boldly risk confronting the statue and its mysteries.

I
N HIS
dialogue
Protagoras
, written around 360
B.C
.,
Plato mentioned sculptors briefly:

About five centuries later, while the Roman Empire was at its height, the satirist Lucian, who had been a sculptor himself as a young man, warned against such a life:

In Greek and Roman times, despite the taste for sculpture in both societies, sculptors as a group hovered on an ill-defined plateau among skilled tradesmen. There was such a thing as art in the ancient world, but there wasn’t really such a thing as an artist in the modern sense. A sculptor might be considered more elevated than a sandal maker, say, but he was still a tradesman and part of that social group. A Greek seeing a sculptor, sweaty and covered with flakes of marble, his hands rough and gnarled from his work, would have the same reaction Lucian had so many years later. However much a sculptor’s work might be admired, few in ancient times would want to change places with one.

There were exceptions.
Phidias, for example, was both a masterful sculptor and a successful building contractor. He oversaw the construction of the
Parthenon in
Athens and the
temple of Zeus at Olympia, and created the massive statues of Athena for the Parthenon and Zeus for Olympia. Although his talent as a sculptor was supreme, he owed his wealth and powerful position to his friendship with the great
Pericles, who then dominated Athens and placed him in charge of the construction of the temples. That position in turn gave Phidias the power to let lucrative contracts. Unfortunately for him, his exalted status didn’t last. In time the enemies of Pericles accused Phidias first of embezzlement, then of impiety, and he died in prison.

References like these from
Plato and Lucian have become part of a large but patchy fabric of similar written references from across the centuries of antiquity. Scholars labor over every detail of that fabric, because what we know of Greek sculptors comes from occasional and often offhand references in the
ancient texts that have survived. Some of these texts are histories or travelogues from writers such as
Herodotus,
Pliny,
Plutarch, and
Pausanias, and some are inscriptions, such as those on the bases for statues that have long since disappeared. Without this written record we would know nothing about the work of Phidias,
Skopas,
Polyclitus,
Praxiteles, or any other great artist of the classical age, because none of their works, not even a single fragment of a single statue that we can identify, has survived.

The only way we can get an approximation of what their work looked like is by basic, obvious
Meisterforschung
—that is, by linking a description in one of the texts to one or more surviving statues that appear to be later copies. Sometimes the correspondence between text and copy is exact and the identification can be absolute. One of the most famous Greek statues both then and now was the Diskobolos (Discus Thrower) by
Myron. Lucian happened to describe it this way:

And enough statues that match this description have been unearthed to show how widely copied the Diskobolos was and to let us see its shape.

At least we see its general shape, since the copies are not identical. The way the knees are bent, the way the hand holds the discus, the angle of the head, and many other details may all be different from one copy to another. Occasionally, some misguided scholar will try to reconstruct the original by taking the feet from one copy, the head from another, and so on, but this is a useless, misleading exercise, since the resulting mélange must
inevitably show the taste of the modern restorer rather than that of the antique sculptor.

Furthermore, it’s a good possibility that
none
of the copyists duplicated the statue exactly and that they didn’t really care whether they did or not. There is a slight chance that one or another of the copyists could have been working from a cast, but more likely they were working from a copy and were not trying to make an exact replica. Instead they wanted to make their own version of what had become a standard subject, just as an early
Renaissance master might paint an Annunciation in much the same style and pose as other Annunciations but with his own distinctive touches.

The inexactness of copies is the weakness in
Meisterforschung
as Furtwängler used it. He pushed the connections too hard and made bold but insupportable assumptions, as did Reinach, Ravaisson, and other archeologists before him. It’s an easy thing to do. In the quotations above,
Plato and Lucian both mention the same two sculptors, Phidias and
Polyclitus. We know from a number of other sources that indeed their work was revered in the ancient world. But suppose that the reference in Plato was the only source for the names. One’s impulse would still be to assume that these two sculptors were considered masters in ancient times. Why else would Plato mention them? But without corroborating sources, it would also be possible that through some quirk of taste Plato happened to like the work of these two while few others did. Or, since Plato’s passage clearly concerns paying a sculptor to become his apprentice, perhaps Phidias and Polyclitus were known more for their teaching than for their own work.

To complicate matters further, we tend to assume that the ancient world valued the works that have come down to us the same way we do, but that may not be true. The Venus de Milo, never mentioned in any surviving text, stuck in a niche in a gymnasium on a minor island, is a perfect example. Marble sculpture itself, though certainly important, was less important to the Greeks than all the marbles in our museums would indicate. It
appears that the Greeks considered painting a higher art than sculpture and painters the greater craftsmen; but since so little Greek painting survives, its role is much diminished in our thinking about the ancient world. Although sculptors ranked below painters, they probably ranked above those who made mosaics. Sculptors at least signed their work while the creators of the glorious ancient mosaics did not.

There were even other forms of sculpture that were considered superior to marble. The most highly prized was a technique called chryselephantine, in which a wooden core was covered with plates of ivory representing flesh and worked gold for clothing. Because of its expense, it was rarely used except for cult statues in temples like
Phidias’s Athena in the
Parthenon. The presence of these precious materials made chryselephantine statues a constant temptation to ransackers, and only a few fragments of the technique have survived. Next in importance came bronze, and few bronze statues remain because that metal is easily melted down for other purposes. Then at last came marble. It was used most often for works of less importance—funerary reliefs, copies of bronze statues, and carvings on the pediments of temples. The
Elgin marbles, which come from the pediments of a temple, reside at the center of our thinking about Greek art. But the Greeks themselves thought so little of these temple decorations that they rarely bothered to record the names of the men who carved them.

Part of the appeal of classical marbles is the pure whiteness of the stone, yet that pure whiteness isn’t at all what the original audience for these statues saw. The statues were painted, often in colors that would seem garish to us, and given metal weapons or loaded with jewelry that might be mere trinkets in some cases but real gold and gems in others. The Venus de Milo had a band around her right biceps—the hole for the pin to hold it in place is still clearly visible. She had earrings valuable enough that robbers broke off her earlobes to get to them. We know she had a choker around her neck, since the slight groove where it
rested is clear, and since the goddess loved necklaces, the statue was most likely adorned with them, too. And she probably wore a tiara, and bracelets around her missing wrists. The drapery around her hips and legs might have been painted in a pattern with varied hues. Ancient authors often describe Venus as “golden,” so her hair was probably painted yellow or perhaps even gilded. Greeks liked to paint lips bright red, so she would have seemed to us to be wearing lipstick. They liked to paint eyes red, too. Probably her flesh was left unpainted, but the exposed marble would have been polished to a high shine and might even have been waxed. All this paint, jewelry, and polish, which to the modern eye seems extraneous and in the worst possible taste, made statues appear more lifelike to the Greeks. If we could see marble statues as they were in antiquity, adorned with jewels and bursting with radiant color, we might feel the same way.

Aesthetics aside, the loss of these baubles can make identification of statues difficult or impossible. A bronze of a bearded god from about 460
B.C
. was recovered from a shipwreck. His left arm is extended and his right is cocked to throw a long weapon, which is missing. If the weapon was a spear, the god is Zeus; if it was a trident, then he’s Poseidon. That’s the best we can do. Another beautiful bronze, this one from the fourth century
B.C.
, shows a handsome young man holding some missing object in his outstretched right hand. If it was a Gorgon’s head, he’s Perseus; if it was an apple, he’s Hercules; or perhaps he was holding something entirely different that would make him some other character. The missing arms of the Venus de Milo have complicated her identification. Most likely she is a Venus, but if the statue had been found with intact arms holding a trident, as
Salomon Reinach believed she was originally displayed, then she was an Amphitrite. That would have settled any question of her identity, but her fame would have been reduced. It’s difficult to imagine the phrase “Amphitrite de Milo” becoming part of the popular vocabulary.

A
PHRODITE
is the Greek goddess the Romans knew as Venus, which is what Europeans have called her since Roman times. Venus/Aphrodite is sometimes called the goddess of love and of beauty, which is true enough but not the full story. She had two natures. In one, Aphrodite Urania, she was the goddess of pure, exalted love. As Aphrodite Pandemos she was the goddess of lust and sex. In some of her temples, such as the one in Corinth, the priestesses were prostitutes. In certain Greek cities of Asia Minor a young woman had to offer herself for sale at the temple to have sex with a stranger one time, with the money going to the temple, before she could marry. Aphrodite was less important during archaic times, but her significance grew with the years. By the time the Venus de Milo was created, the goddess was widely revered.

One clear account of her origin and adventures is in
The Greek Myths
by
Robert Graves. Mother Earth emerged from Chaos and gave birth to a son, Uranus. He in turn fathered the twelve Titans. Cronus, the youngest, urged on by Mother Earth and armed by her with a flint sickle, castrated Uranus. Cronus held his father’s genitals in his left hand—considered the sinister hand for eons afterward—before he threw them into the sea. Foam gathered around them, and from it, fully formed, sprang Aphrodite.

In addition to her beauty, she had a girdle that made men fall in love with whomever wore it. Other goddesses asked her to lend it to them, but she seldom did.

Zeus, the son of Cronus who in turn overthrew his father to become king of the gods, gave Aphrodite to Hephaestus (Vulcan to the Romans) as a wife. Hephaestus was lame and worked constantly at his forge. Aphrodite began a long affair with Ares (Mars) and had three children by him, although Hephaestus thought they were his own.

One day the two lovers tarried too long in bed in Ares’s palace, and the sun saw them as he rose. He told Hephaestus, who immediately forged a net of gold chains. These chains were so fine they were invisible but still strong enough to be unbreakable. Hephaestus draped the net on the posts of his bed. When Aphrodite, happy and smiling, returned home from Ares’s bed, Hephaestus told her he was leaving for a short holiday. She wished him well and, once he had left, immediately sent for Ares.