Gregory Curtis (29 page)

This lofty place in our culture is exactly what the French wanted for the Venus de Milo so that her glory would reflect onto them. As we’ve seen, they actively promoted the statue from the moment of her discovery, and this campaign still creates echoes in French culture many generations later. One recent spring afternoon at the Louvre I listened as a docent brought a group of French schoolgirls, about ten years old, to see the statue. She told them how the Venus was found on Melos and then brought to the Louvre. She pointed out the cracks at the hips and the line in the drapery where the two halves meet and commented on the twists and curves in the body. Then, standing with the girls gathered around her, the docent lowered her voice and said that the Venus had once stood next to a statue of Mars, the god of war. And she assumed the position that both Quatremère and Ravaisson had insisted on for the statue. She extended her left arm as if it were resting on the god’s shoulder and brought her right hand across her stomach as if to touch his arm. She held the pose for a moment, looking at the girls. Then she dropped her arms, raised a finger, and said that the most important thing about the statue is that it is an original. “An original!” she repeated with emphasis. How proud Quatrèmere and Ravaisson would have been of her.

But French propaganda is not the reason why the Venus de Milo has fascinated artists for generations or why great masses of tourists arrive at the Louvre each day to see her. They come because the statue is beautiful in a way that even an untrained eye immediately understands. Its classicism is the source of that instant recognition. Ever since Winckelmann brought Greek art back into our culture, we have thought of Greek idealized nude sculpture as both the beginning of Western art and an achievement that has not been surpassed in the two and a half millennia since. There can be only one convenient public symbol of this achievement—two or more would just confuse things. The
Venus de Milo, beautiful and genuinely Greek, not a Roman copy of some earlier masterpiece, has been that symbol from the moment the statue was first displayed at the Louvre.

Classical though her beauty is, it is far easier to see than it is to describe. Although apparently simple and immediately comprehensible, the statue is actually so complex that Sir
Kenneth Clark once remarked: “[The] planes of her body are so large and calm that at first we do not realize the number of angles through which they pass. In architectural terms, she is a baroque composition with classic effect.” He also said the “Aphrodite of Melos makes us think of an elm tree in a field of corn.” I find that last comparison completely baffling, but the large planes and angles are all there to see. We spoke in the last chapter of the conflicting movements to the left in the upper half of the statue and to the right in the lower. These opposing tensions are so strong that they could have made the statue appear to be twisting itself apart. Instead, even more powerful dynamics unify the statue and produce the surprising calm that Clark mentioned.

In the Louvre, it’s possible to see the Venus de Milo from every angle. The pose in contrapposto, with her left knee bent slightly inward while her weight rests on her straight right leg, produces a large, elongated S-curve. It begins at her left shoulder, moves to her right armpit, then runs down across her body to her left knee, where it turns again and runs through the lower drapery before ending at the right foot. This long, lazy curve is intersected by two dramatic Xs. The first X is tall and skinny. One line begins just at the right of her neck and goes down to her missing left foot. The second line begins halfway from her neck to her left shoulder and goes down to her right foot. These two lines cross at her navel. The second X, shorter and wider, crisscrosses her torso. One line begins at the edge of her right shoulder and goes to her left hip. The other begins at her left shoulder and goes to her right hip. These lines meet directly above her navel at the fold across her stomach. The languor of the S combined with the rigid simplicity of the two Xs helps
give the statue both her baroque complexity and her classic calm.

The line of her shoulders, tilted slightly downward from left to right, is parallel with the line of the fold of drapery around her hips and also parallel with a line from her missing left foot to her right. These parallel lines serve to unite the statue while their slope to the right is neutralized, even dominated, in part by the twist of her torso but even more by her head. It floats on its long neck as the goddess gazes to the left toward the spot where her missing arm once held the apple.

The flesh appears so real that one expects it to be warm to the touch. Some of that is due to the translucence of the marble, but mostly it’s the result of the delicate skill Alexandros had with a chisel. One example is the small fold of flesh near the armpit that’s been displaced by the right arm. On a grander scale, the back in particular is an expanse of flesh with small undulations of muscle and a long, narrow, bowed furrow for her spine that runs from the bottom of her neck to the line of her buttocks. This bow is echoed in the curve of her right hip and waist. This is the most sensuous back ever carved in stone. The three tendrils of hair on her neck that have come loose from her bun subtly enhance this eroticism.

When her face is seen from the three-quarter right profile, as the artist intended, it appears regular although, as the German anatomists Henke and Hasse were to discover, it is in fact quite irregular. The eyes are not symmetrical. The mouth and chin are slightly to the right of center of the nose. Even the part in her hair is not centered but somewhat to the left. Her eyes are deep in her head and emphasize the roundness of her cheeks. Her eyebrows and upper eyelids are delicate, although a touch severe, and the ends of her mouth turn down slightly, giving to some viewers an impression of disdain.

The face is the most criticized part of the statue. While disdainful to some, it’s blank or expressionless to others. In fact, her expression is neither disdainful nor blank but completely absorbed. If her arms were intact, we could see that her apple of
victory is what draws her attention. She is pondering her own beauty. That accounts for the pride shown in the slight downward turn of her lips. Her absorption turns out to be self-absorption.

But without the arms we can’t see what it is that she contemplates. All we know is that it’s something there to her left but invisible to us. That gives the statue a mystery and depth that would be absent if we knew her thoughts were on herself.

It’s curious how little the arms are missed. Knowing they
were
there is enough. Their absence doesn’t affect the pleasure in seeing the drapery wrapped around her legs, the elegant twist of her torso, the sexuality that even her back exudes, the quizzical irregularity of her face, the unruly strands of hair on her neck, or the subtle displacement of her flesh by the right arm. More than that, the loss of the arms has actually deepened the statue’s meaning. Goddesses, after all, and especially Aphrodite, are somewhat frivolous. As immortals, they cannot suffer. As objects of adoration, they cannot lose at love. Their hearts cannot break. The missing arms bring the goddess down to earth among us. Here she is vulnerable just as we are, and her frivolity and her self-absorption vanish. She retains our admiration, but now she has our sympathy, too. That sympathy, which connects the viewer with the statue, secures her enduring popularity.

The Venus de Milo proves that great art transcends its time and place, and even the purpose for which it was intended. Whatever Greek society may have assumed about women, one Greek man, Alexandros, created the Venus de Milo, who is a beauty, a mother, a force of nature, a mortal woman contemplating the unknown, and a goddess absorbed in her own beauty. She was that complex and radiant being more than two thousand years ago. Rediscovered, she immediately resumed her role and has maintained it for almost two centuries. During that time the world has changed many times, but she has not. What is beauty? What is a mother, a force of nature, a mortal woman? What is a goddess? While you look at her, the answers seem within reach. Look away and mystery returns.

Works cited here in brief are given in full in the Bibliography.