Gregory Curtis (27 page)

T
HE STATUE
was discovered in a niche with an arched entrance and an arched ceiling. A few years later, as we have seen, a Dutch trader discovered two more identical niches in the same ancient wall, each holding the remains of a statue. The three niches were twenty paces apart from one another. Greek
gymnasiums had walls built just this way, with regularly spaced niches to hold statues.

By the Hellenistic age gymnasiums throughout the Greek world were places for athletic training as well as private preparatory
schools for boys. In that regard they were rather like the gymnasiums of nineteenth-century Germany—which had been created after the Greek model—where Furtwängler’s father was a headmaster. Surviving inscriptions show that there were footraces, races in armor, races with torches, wrestling, and boxing, among other contests, all divided into divisions for boys, young men, and men. For boys and young men there were also competitions in music composition, lyre playing, singing, painting, and arithmetic.

The teachers, like sculptors, had the social status of tradesmen, but the gymnasiarch, equivalent to a modern headmaster, was a wealthy man with great prestige and great obligations. He was supposed to endow funds for the proper religious sacrifices, for prizes in contests, and for keeping the buildings of the gymnasium in good repair. In small or remote communities like Melos he might even double as a sort of magistrate for the town.

Gymnasiums all looked much the same. There was a large, open rectangular area in the center known as the palaestra, where the sports and games took place. A covered colonnade ran beside the palaestra. Here men could lounge and watch the athletes, or the young students could attend their classes.

Behind the colonnade were walls with niches at regular intervals for statues, which might be of gods or goddesses, of mythical heroes, or even of local heroes who had triumphed in the various competitions. Every gymnasium had statues that honored Hermes and Hercules, the patrons of gymnasiums, and, beginning in the second century
B.C.
, Venus. This was the start of a tradition that would continue to expand among the Romans, who honored Venus as the patroness of places for contests and spectacles.

The niche where the Venus de Milo was found had an engraved stone over its entrance. This stone arrived at the Louvre with the statue. Evidently Rivière acquired it when he stopped at Melos on his voyage back to France with the Venus in
the hold. It has since disappeared, but fortunately Clarac carefully copied the inscription. It said, “Bacchios, son of S[extus] Atius, having finished his term as assistant gymnasiarque, [dedicates] both the exedra and the [missing word] to Hermes Hercules.” Here we have the assistant gymnasiarch fulfilling his obligations by dedicating statues for the gymnasium. Furtwängler thought that the missing word, which had been obscured by a crack in the stone, mentioned a statue. Assuming that he is correct, the inscription over the niche mentioned Hermes, Hercules, and a statue. Inside, on that April day in 1820, Voutier and
Yorgos found a herm of Hermes, a herm of Hercules, and a statue. All this fits together too neatly to be merely coincidental. The Venus de Milo must have been found in the place where she was originally displayed. And the two herms were part of the same display.

The base of the herm representing Hercules, missing from the Louvre since 1821, was the one with the inscription that read “[Alex]andros son of Menides citizen of
Antioch of Meander made the statue.” The long battles over whether or not this base belonged with the statue were fruitless, motivated entirely by the French insistence on dating the statue much earlier than the Hellenistic era. Since Antioch wasn’t founded until about 280
B.C.
, after the classical age had already passed, the French could not admit that the inscription belonged with their revered work of art. Quatremère, Ravaisson, and Reinach all fought valiantly but in a futile cause. The legs wrapped in cloth, along with the mixture of realism with classicism in the carving, date the Venus de Milo to Hellenistic times anyway. That means that the inscription and the date it implies are perfectly in keeping with the statue. In fact,
Antiochus Epiphanes, a Hellenistic king who reigned in Antioch and was famous in the
Bible for trying to force Greek religion on the
Jews, was so enamored of Greek culture that he made Antioch a center of Greek art. He died in 164
B.C.
, but for generations after him Antioch was famous for its wealth and luxury, its devotion to pleasure, and its love of the
arts. If a patron anywhere in the Greek world wanted to hire a sculptor with skill and training, Antioch was a place where one could be found.

Two more points make it certain that the inscribed base of the beardless herm and the base of the Venus were connected. One is the inscription itself. Since it says that Alexandros of Antioch “made the statue,” the base must have belonged with
some
statue or the inscription would make no sense. The Venus de Milo was the only statue found near this inscribed base. More importantly, at the Louvre the broken edge of this inscribed base was placed in the jagged cavity on the left side of the Venus de Milo, and the two fit together perfectly. Debay’s drawing shows them matching. Clarac is explicit about how well the statue and the base matched. He says the inscribed base fit perfectly with “the alignment of the front surface of the ancient plinth [that is, the base of the statue] and it also fits exactly both at the rear and at the side with the fractures.” In other words, not only do the fractures of the two pieces fit, but the inscribed base is the same depth and height as the base of the statue. The statue and the inscribed base were created at the same moment.

Unknown to the nineteenth-century scholars, the name of the artist from Antioch that is on the broken base is also on an inscription from
Thespiae, a city near Mount Helicon on the mainland of Greece where an important contest of poetry and theatrical arts was held every five years. In an inscription from around 80
B.C.
, Alexandros of Antioch is mentioned twice, as a victor at singing and at composing. Evidently he was the composer and singer of songs as well as a sculptor. The Thespiae inscription also allows us to date the statue closer to 80 than 150
B.C
.

The life we can read from these inscriptions is typical of an artist of the time. Leaving his home in Antioch, wandering wherever his commissions took him, he managed to create some ephemeral fame by singing songs here and carving sculptures there. He may have been a great poet and musician, but all we know is that he was good enough to win the contest in Thespiae.
As a sculptor, however, he was indisputably a genius whose name deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as
Phidias,
Praxiteles, and the other ancient masters. Alexandros, son of Menides, citizen of Antioch, was the artist who created the Venus de Milo.

T
HE POSITION
of the right arm is not difficult to determine. It extended down across her stomach and bent toward the left. The stump of the right arm precludes almost any other position. And a hole beneath the right breast, now filled with plaster but still visible, once held a tenon to support the right arm as it bent across her stomach.

The position of the left arm is more mysterious. The solution to the mystery depends on understanding how Alexandros intended his statue to be displayed.

Since the inscribed base that held the herm of Hercules was part of the original statue, the herm stood at the goddess’s left. That means she could not have been grouped with a statue of Mars as both Quatremère de Quincy and Félix Ravaisson had supposed, since there is no place for the warrior to stand. Furtwängler’s restoration with her left arm resting on a pillar is also impossible, since there is no place for the pillar either. The Venus de Milo standing beside an undistinguished herm of Hercules, a figure that is too short and too narrow for the large statue next to it, is another indication that the Greek aesthetic was not the same as ours. It’s an ugly, ludicrous composition, and neither the French scholars nor Furtwängler believed that a sculptor with the skill and sensibility to create the Venus de Milo would have joined his masterpiece with something so trivial. But Alexandros of Antioch did exactly that.

Perhaps he had his reasons. It was rare for a large statue to stand beside a small one, but not unknown.
Salomon Reinach’s own
Index of Greek and Roman Statuary
of 1908, a revised version
of a work by Clarac, shows several statues of Venus with small figures standing almost underfoot and one, from a collection in Berlin, of a Venus standing beside a herm.

Or perhaps Alexandros had no choice. The passage from Lucian about a sculptor’s life laments the way sculptors must be subservient to their patrons. This unsightly coupling might have been what Bacchios, the assistant gymnasiarch who dedicated the niche and therefore could have commissioned the statue, insisted on having. Even during that distant era, it wouldn’t have been the first time that an artist’s patron proved to have unfortunate taste.

Much of the statue’s power derives from the contrasting dynamics between the draped and undraped portions. The motion of the lower half of the statue is toward the right. Her hips are turned slightly to the right, and her bent left knee turns inward, a movement that draws the drapery tight against her left leg and reveals its shape. The folds in the drapery begin high on the left hip and thigh and fall dramatically down toward the right. All this powerful movement ends abruptly at the right leg. Straight and firm, it supports most of the goddess’s weight. Its rigidity resolves all the motion to the right in the drapery and gives the statue a stable foundation in the midst of so much dynamism.

By contrast, all the motion in the upper part of the statue is to the left: The chest, shoulders, and head all turn to the left as the goddess stares into the distance. Originally, this leftward motion must have appeared even more pronounced, since the right arm must have extended down across her stomach and to the left. That would strongly emphasize yet again the movement in that direction.

But in the statue as we see it today all this motion is unresolved. There must have been some reason for it. The herm is too small. The answer must lie with the left arm and what it was doing.

The carving on the left side of the statue is less careful and refined than on the rest. Both Quatremère de Quincy and
Ravaisson thought that was because she was standing next to a warrior. But if the statue was displayed so that it was seen in three-quarter right profile—and its shape makes it clear that this is how Alexandros wanted his statue to be seen—then the left side of the statue wouldn’t be visible either. In the gymnasium wall niche, enclosed on three sides, the sculptor could place his statue exactly at the angle he wanted.

At the time of the discovery a left hand holding an apple was found in the niche with the statue. This hand was even more roughly carved than the left side of the statue, but it was carved from identical marble and had the proper proportions to belong to the Venus. A portion of the upper left arm, also in the correct proportion and of the same marble, was found as well.

The upper arm fit in the left shoulder of the statue. It stuck out directly to the left. Debay’s drawing shows that as clearly as it shows the perfect fit between the base of the statue and the broken base with the inscription. So the left arm, most likely bent somewhat at the elbow, extended directly to the left with its hand—the hand holding the apple—held aloft. The Venus de Milo was holding up the apple in her left hand as she serenely contemplated the symbol of her victory over Juno and Minerva.

A Venus with an apple is a common motif in Greek sculpture, but it is particularly appropriate for the Venus de Milo. The Greek word for apple was
melon
. The island was named
Melos because to the Greeks its shape resembled an apple. An apple became the symbol of the island. A sculptor who was commissioned to carve a Venus for the island of Melos could hardly resist a pose that emphasized this double meaning.

Displayed as she was in those days, the Venus de Milo, whose image we know so well, would have been barely recognizable to us. She stood in the shadows of the niche, competing for attention with the pattern painted on the walls. She wore jewels on her head, ears, and arms. The marble of her torso was polished. Her hair was painted gold; her eyes and lips were red. Her drapery was painted in a pattern. Turned to a three-quarter right profile, she looked away from the men and boys who saw
her. All her attention was on the apple she held in her raised left arm, which extended obliquely back into the shadows of the niche.

That was the statue that Alexandros created for the gymnasium on Melos. The passing of centuries, which wore away the paint and the polish, which saw the jewels purloined and the arms broken off, created the statue we know. But some shadow or ghost of the original seems to have survived and at the moment of discovery was still capable of making its presence felt. The early witnesses—Olivier Voutier, Dumont d’Urville, the captains from the French ships—all assumed that the statue showed Venus holding the apple from Paris. It never occurred to them that the statue was anything else. The shade of the statue in its original glory led these mariners closer to the truth than all the hard work, contaminated as it was by national rivalries, of the sage scholars who came after them.

I
N
1886 a German anatomist named
W. Henke and his colleague
Christoph Hasse found themselves in an intense dispute over the Venus de Milo. As German scholars were prone to do, Henke had studied the statue in minute detail. In a paper that year, he concluded that imperfections in the statue’s anatomy meant that the sculptor had worked from a live model and that this live model was deformed! Noting that the legs were of different lengths and that the pelvis was tilted off the horizontal, Henke believed that the model must have limped. An even greater flaw, according to him, was the asymmetry of the goddess’s face. The line that connected both pupils and the line that connected the two ends of the lips were not parallel to each other. And neither of those lines was perpendicular to the nose. These asymmetries did occur in life, Henke admitted, but always as an abnormality.