Gregory Curtis

by Disarmed: The Story of the Venus De Milo

  She is wrong about more than just the fight, since the alleged battle was against Turks, not Greeks, and the Turks certainly had no respect for Greek antiquities. The Europeans saw themselves, often correctly, as protecting the Greek heritage from the hostile Turks.

  Augustinos has a light touch, however, compared to Caroline Arscott and Katie Scott, both of the Courtauld Institute in London, who write in Manifestations of Venus: Art and Sexuality (2000):

  Though Marcellus never admits to a fight, the Souvenirs repeatedly invoke strife between the contending French, Greek, and Turkish parties for possession of the Venus.… More particularly, the distribution of the means and use of force in the text in a pattern that contrasted the French (heavily armed but choosing rather to persuade by force of reason) with the Turks and Greeks (poorly equipped but willing in their ignorance and greed to seize the statue by force, though damage was certain) crudely and predictably put into play a set of reinforcing oppositions between West and East, Christian and Muslim, reason and passion, civilization and barbarism. As such the violence of the narrative also had something to say about the origins of Western culture.

  “Something to say about the origins of Western culture”? What, exactly? Here again, these authors get more wrong than the fight on the shore, and they are guilty of the cultural stereotyping they pretend to oppose. For instance, the Turkish military of 1820 was not poorly equipped. On the contrary, it controlled a vast empire, including all of southeastern Europe, that once stretched from the Caspian Sea almost to Budapest. For these authors the fight simply must have happened. If there was no fight, the facts of the discovery and acquisition would not support their political theories. Such are the results of Ravaisson’s delay in closing Pandora’s box.

  The Venus of the Gardens

  RAVAISSON’S refutation of Aicard in 1892, although arriving too late to be effective, was at least convincing. He trotted out Voutier’s sketches, explaining how he obtained them so as to establish their authenticity, and rested his case. Then Ravaisson spent the remainder of his essay describing and defending his reconstruction of the statue. Here, too, his long delay—the best excuse is that these were to be his final words on the Venus de Milo after twenty years of study—proved self-defeating. He lived so much in his own mind that he had not noticed the new generation of archeologists who had come of age. They were different. They knew more than their counterparts in the past, and they played rough.

  Ravaisson, like Quatremère de Quincy, had always thought that the Venus de Milo had been paired with a statue of Mars. In his paper of 1871, where he began by describing his discovery of the two wooden wedges and the faulty restoration at the Louvre, he even identified the second figure as being like the Borghese Mars, a sculpture showing a nude Mars with a helmet, a shield on his left arm, and a short sword in his right hand.

  Ravaisson never wavered from his belief that these two statues belonged together, although he eventually came to believe that the Borghese statue was not Mars but Theseus, the legendary king of Athens who as a young man had killed the Minotaur on Crete. The clue was a band on the statue’s right ankle, a reminder of the time when Theseus was taken to Crete as a slave in chains.

  Ravaisson sculpted many versions of the Venus de Milo and the Borghese statue standing together. He tried them turned at different angles to each other and with Venus’s arms in different poses. He had a plaster cast of the most convincing arrangement made in the true size of the two statues. The male stands straight while Venus is in three-quarter profile to his right. Her left foot is behind her right. Her right arm comes over to his right side, her fingers separated. Her left hand holds the apple and rests lightly on his right shoulder.

  All his life, from the time Delacroix heard him speak at the Louvre until his final philosophical writings in the year before his death, Ravaisson wanted to show that the ancient world could be reconciled with Christianity, that the Greeks themselves were almost Christians even though they lived before Christ. By grouping the Venus de Milo with a statue of Theseus, Ravaisson could show that the Venus, as he had reconstructed it, with the immortal woman and the mortal man in a moment of tender intimacy, was an “image expressing a divine grace that is going to look for humanity in order to unite with it—a conception that was not foreign to Judaism, where Jehovah seems to seek out the elected nation, and that the Christian religion was to carry, after paganism and Judaism, to a new height.”

  From here Ravaisson passes even further into the imaginary. He tries to determine the prototype for the Venus de Milo and chooses a statue known as the Venus of the Gardens by either Phidias or one of his pupils. It was created in the fifth century B.C. in Athens. We know of it only through references in ancient writings. Ravaisson surmises that the Venus de Milo together with Theseus was a version of the Venus of the Gardens done during the time of Alexander—the fourth century B.C.—specifically to grace the theater in Melos.

  Ravaisson’s reconstruction of the Venus de Milo with the Borghese Mars (illustration credit 4.2)

  Ravaisson weaves an elaborate rationale for his choice, although it is undoubtedly wrong. For one thing, no ancient author mentions either Mars or Theseus together with the Venus of the Gardens. Ravaisson himself dismisses this objection airily, but the point remains.

  Ravaisson was too isolated from the world to understand or even to suspect that during his lifetime archeology had changed. It was no longer an avocation for scholars with an appreciation for ancient art and some knowledge of classical languages; now it was a profession that required training and experience and that aspired to become a science. Salomon Reinach, who by 1890 had become the leading archeologist in France, reviewed Ravaisson’s paper. He treated the old man gently and praised him for disproving the still current story of the fight on the beach in Melos. But, Reinach says, the grouping with the Borghese Mars derives “less from proven facts than from personal impressions and judgments.” Even worse, there “are errors, slight no doubt, but too numerous to allow the critic to conceal them.” He then lists, in a withering footnote, some twenty errors.

  Adolf Furtwängler, Reinach’s counterpart in Germany, also reviewed Ravaisson’s paper. He saw no need to be gentle with a man, no matter how aged or distinguished, whom he thought to be simply wrong. Furtwängler gives Ravaisson credit for proving that the fight on the shore was a myth, but the rest of the paper had “only the value of a dilettante’s fantasy.” The grouping with the Borghese Mars is “certainly one of the most absurd and unfortunate of all restorations.” And he thought Ravaisson’s ignorance was staggering: “A large role is played in Ravaisson’s conjectures by the ring that Theseus wears on two famous vases. Ravaisson unites it with the ring of the Mars Borghese, but overlooks the fact that the ring was a fashionable touch during a particular period of vase painting, even occurring on some figures of Silenus, so it has absolutely no special significance.”

  RAVAISSON was eighty-one in 1892 when he wrote his final paper on the statue. He lived for eight more years. He was lucid to the end, but his interests had returned to metaphysics. He retreated increasingly into his speculations, to the point that he couldn’t recognize his two adored granddaughters at first if they surprised him on the street as he returned home from his office. He still had his luminous blue eyes and dressed in bright colors, and his work in philosophy had influenced the next generation of French and German thinkers. As an archeologist, however, he had thought himself into irrelevance. His archeological papers were based on deduction from a few premises—the way a philosopher reasons—rather than on research and deduction from the proven facts, as a scientist reasons. In the end, his only permanent contributions to archeology are not his theories or his reconstructions but the important facts fate placed in his way: the wedges between the two halves of the Venus de Milo and Voutier’s sketches.

  The future belonged to the next generation, specifically to Salomon Reinach in France and Adolf Furtwängler in Germany. Furtwängler had concluded his criti
que of Ravaisson’s paper by saying, “I must decline further comment on questions addressing the Venus de Milo itself, because an essay by me on the subject is currently on the press.” When that essay appeared a few months later, the future had arrived. Reinach responded with papers of his own, and classical archeology, once the domain of titled art connoisseurs and gentle philosophers, became a contact sport.

  V

  Two Geniuses

  OF ALL the peoples of Europe, the Germans of the nineteenth century were by far the most obsessed with classical Greece. And they had a particular, almost proprietary interest in the Venus de Milo, in part because they thought it was rightfully theirs. In 1817 Prince Ludwig of Bavaria, who was passionate about classical antiquity, had bought the ruined theater in Melos. After the discovery of the Venus de Milo in 1820, he claimed the statue. He was not convinced by the French government’s reply that his claim was invalid because the statue had been found near—but not on—his property. After that, the statue had an aura of lost love for the Germans. It was still visible, yet forever out of reach. The romantic poet Heinrich Heine used to talk to her in the Louvre. During his last visit to see the statue before leaving Paris he burst into tears.

  But Heine was a poet. German archeologists, disappointed that Germany couldn’t have the statue, became skeptical of its real value. As a group they put the date of the statue in the first century B.C., during the supposedly inferior Hellenistic times, and not during the fourth-century classical period, as the French insisted. The Germans were in effect devaluing the jewel of the French collections, although that didn’t stop German scholars from proposing various reconstructions. Christoph Hasse, a fellow at the anatomical institute of the University of Breslau, tried to determine the position of the missing arms by close observation of the muscles in the back and shoulder. He concluded that she was removing her robe with her right hand and loosening her hair with her left as she was about to enter the sea. Other scholars proposed that she was holding a shield or a mirror and was lost in her own reflection. A scholar named Viet Valentin, after pondering every square millimeter of the statue, decided that she was recoiling while warding off a male god who had surprised her at her bath.

  These reconstructions all seem unlikely today, but they were dutifully discussed until Adolf Furtwängler appeared. His career had the effect of shoving all that had come before into the distant background.

  In 1872, when Furtwängler was nineteen, his father sent him to study at Leipzig, an important intellectual center at the time. Furtwängler was bored with his classes, but he did discover a Leipzig museum with plaster casts of classical statues. In those days, before photographs and widespread travel made seeing art relatively easy, museums everywhere in Europe filled their rooms with plaster casts of masterpieces from the classical age. Wandering among these casts made Furtwängler feel ignorant and uncomprehending of even their basic forms. He couldn’t stand that feeling and, as it turned out, spent the rest of his life trying to eradicate it.

  In 1873 he transferred to the University of Munich, where he studied with Heinrich von Brunn, a venerable founding father of German archeology. Brunn found himself with a student who had a feverish enthusiasm, immense energy, an unrivaled capacity for work, high intelligence, and, best of all, a visual memory so vast and so acute it was unique in the history of archeology. As Brunn put it, “He is all fire.”

  While studying with Brunn, Furtwängler began what was to become the bedrock of his work throughout his career. He was by instinct a great cataloger. He began by creating detailed personal files containing entries on every piece of antiquity in the collections around Munich. He cataloged large items, such as statues and urns, as well as the smallest pottery shards, coins, and carved gems. His thesis under Brunn in 1876—Eros in Greek Vases—had also been a kind of catalog. But he began to understand the real potential contained in his systematic sorting two years later in a dusty storeroom in Athens.

  Adolf Furtwängler (illustration credit 5.1)

  Furtwängler, who had been traveling and studying in Italy and Greece on a stipend from the German Archeological Institute, had immersed himself in a daunting project involving pottery found during Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations at Mycenae. Schliemann was the flamboyant self-proclaimed archeologist who, convinced of the literal truth of Homer’s Iliad, had discovered the ruins of Troy in northwestern Turkey, along with a hoard of golden objects he called the treasure of Priam. He then turned to Mycenae in Greece, where, to the amazement of the world, he found graves at the bottom of deep shafts, including a death mask he called the mask of Agamemnon. Neither the attribution to Priam nor that to Agamemnon was accurate, but there was no questioning the importance of the finds or the vast popular interest they created.

  At Mycenae Schliemann had found a huge amount of pottery that was sent to a storeroom in Athens, where it was piled indiscriminately. Furtwängler confronted this wasteland of old clay early in 1878. With nothing to go on but his energy, visual memory, and genius for seeing parallels and connections among even widely separated objects, he began to sort the pottery by such simple criteria as color, shape, and firing techniques. After that initial classification, other more subtle and interesting connections began to emerge. Finally, some years later, as he continued to study the pottery—Furtwängler always had eight or ten difficult projects going at the same time—he was able to establish what he called the “evolutionary stages of ornamentation,” which proceeded from clearly drawn natural objects to intricate abstractions. This timeline of designs made it possible to date later finds and to see a changing flow of taste, ideas, events, heroes, and divinities.

  While Furtwängler was still working in Athens, Ernst Curtius, the most famous archeologist in Germany at the time, sent for him to join the German excavations at Olympia. The ruins at this site of the ancient Olympic games beckoned to lovers of Greece, and excavating there had been a dream in Germany since Winckelmann. Surely here, where for centuries the Greeks had met for the sacred games, the greatest artifacts of the Greek genius must lie buried in the rubble. The Germans hoped that the sculpture in the temples at Olympia might surpass even the Elgin marbles and the Venus de Milo.

  Curtius had recruited Furtwängler to Olympia to help with an awkward situation. It wasn’t that the excavations had come up dry. On the contrary, many thousands of objects had been found. A similar discovery today would be in newspapers and magazines with dazzling photographs and ecstatic quotes from scientists about their good fortune. But for Curtius and, more important, for the royal family and the German government who sponsored the dig, and for the German people who had taken Curtius’s romantic history of Greece to their hearts, the finds were not of the right sort at all.

  In nineteenth-century Germany, unlike in France, classical philology was the foundation of scholarship about the ancient world. Philology, which involved deriving conclusions and interpretations from a close reading of the ancient texts, originated in the early Middle Ages when monks pondered Latin religious texts letter by letter. The reliance on philology to learn about the ancient world meant that artifacts from the past, whether a shard of pottery or the Venus de Milo, had little importance for scholars compared to the written record, such as it was. For them the goal of an archeological dig was to find writing, manuscripts if possible, but inscriptions at the very least.

  For the German public, however, whose professional classes had been steeped in Greek and Latin, the goal of a dig was monumental sculpture, because it was beautiful and inspiring and because it competed with the possessions of the English and French. After statues, wall paintings or mosaics were acceptable, barely, but pottery shards, small figurines, tools, and the detritus of everyday life held no interest for either scholars or the public.

  Unfortunately, shards, tools, figurines, and ancient trash are what archeological digs usually find. Certainly that was the case at Olympia. Despite the assumptions of the glories that would be found there, the digs had produced only o
ne spectacular discovery: the Hermes by Praxiteles. This beautiful statue was at the time taken to be original, and that made it the only positively identified original work still extant by any of the major Greek sculptors. (Beautiful though it is, subsequent research has shown that it, too, is a copy.) Otherwise, the discoveries at Olympia were not inscriptions or monumental sculptures or even mosaics but, rather, a teeming multitude of small, common objects. That was all Curtius had to show for three years of support from the German government. He had to make some sense of it in order to justify all the time, effort, and expense. This was where Furtwängler was supposed to help.

  And he did. After moving from the storeroom in Athens to the excavations at Olympia, even he was disappointed at first in the finds Curtius showed him. He called them “the rubbish of ancient times, small worthless things or single fragments of larger ones.” But if the quality was low, the sheer quantity was overwhelming. The army of diggers found one hundred to two hundred objects every day. By now they had accumulated some 1,300 stone sculptures, 7,500 bronzes, 2,000 terra-cottas, and 3,000 coins. Furtwängler shrugged his shoulders and happily dug in. As he wrote to his beloved teacher Brunn, “I have to say that I feel quite satisfied. If the cataloging of many small bronze objects, coins, and the like is truly onerous, I am learning so much which one otherwise would have no opportunity [to learn].”

  To a layman, creating catalogs like this sounds mundane, and indeed it is often the worst kind of work—tedious, demanding, and endless. Hundreds of objects, or more often thousands upon thousands of objects, need to be handled one by one, measured, described, sketched or photographed, and then filed by style or date or some other kind of classification. Today, no matter how tedious, it is standard practice in archeology, because the accumulation of all this detail, properly organized and then intelligently analyzed, can lead to the most important conclusions about a society’s political and social organization, economy, religion, and daily life. Without a detailed catalog of objects, none of these conclusions could be supported scientifically or even discerned.