Delving into a goddess’ past

Her image is everywhere, even in advertisements seeking to associate some ephemeral modern product with her timeless beauty. She stands poised in her spot at the Louvre where, more than a century ago, the great German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine “used to talk to her” and where, during “his last visit to see the statue before leaving Paris he burst into tears.” More recently, she made a lasting impression on Gregory Curtis, who, like countless visitors to the Louvre, was awestruck by her luminous presence:

“Distant, pale, and shimmering, unconcerned by the hubbub around her even though she is nude, the goddess seems to float above the admiring throng. She looks fresh, forceful, and completely original, the way she must have looked to the people who saw her when she was rediscovered almost two hundred years ago.”

In “Disarmed: The Story of the Venus de Milo,” Curtis, former editor of the Texas Monthly, presents her intriguing history. She was discovered in 1820 on the Greek island of Melos in the Aegean, when 23-year-old Olivier Voutier, an ensign in the French navy, saw her inadvertently unearthed by a farmer trying to remove large chunks of rock from his field.

Voutier had to pay the farmer not to rebury her. For the scoffers who attribute the rapturous response of museum-goers to the artwork’s reputation rather than the object itself, it is interesting to note that Voutier -- and other Frenchmen who first clapped eyes on it -- were similarly astonished, merely by the evidence of their own senses. Or, as Curtis puts it, “The statue is beautiful in a way that even an untrained eye immediately understands.”

But although her majestic beauty and power is apparent to anyone who sees her, her origins and past are shrouded in mystery. When was she sculpted? Who sculpted her? What happened to her missing arms? What gesture was she making? Was this Venus part of a larger sculptural tableau? Indeed, there has even been some doubt as to whether the statue was intended to represent Venus or some other goddess.

To illuminate these mysteries, Curtis delves into the story of her discovery by Voutier, her eventual procurement by France, the reasons why she was considered so priceless a treasure and the controversies that raged over who had created her and when.

It’s a relief to find that this is not one of those tendentious screeds in which some academician intent on beating the long-dead horse of “colonialism” launches into a denunciation of the French for robbing the island of Melos of its heritage. Melos, Curtis opines rather wittily, “may have been the first home of the Venus de Milo.”

“But like so many other provincials who are blessed with intelligence, or beauty, her life did not really begin until she arrived in Paris.” (Indeed, as he later points out, the French authorities were careful enough to obtain formal consent to their purchase, so that over a century later, when Melina Mercouri was asking the British to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece, no one was disputing the right of the French to have Venus in their possession.)

But the story of her procurement is not half so interesting as the rest of the book. Although Voutier on the same site also found a hand holding an apple and a base inscribed with the name of the sculptor, this material, Curtis explains, was deliberately suppressed by the Louvre’s curator because the sculptor’s name, Alexandros, was not a famous one, and the era in which he lived, the Hellenistic, was too late to be part of what pundits deemed the classical era of Greek art.

Why would it matter so much when Venus de Milo had been created? Curtis establishes the groundwork for this in his delightful account of the once famous, now almost forgotten 18th century figure of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a self-taught German scholar and genius whose inspiring and eloquent writings inflamed all of Europe with a passion for classical Greece. Winckelmann also argued that the art of the earlier, classical period was nobler, purer and greater than that of the later eras.

Curtis has a gift for making the ideas, passions and personalities of scholars like Winckelmann come alive, and the story becomes even more dramatic in the latter part of the 19th century, when another great German scholar, Adolf Furtwangler (father of the famous conductor), made the case for Alexandros and the later era. Curtis also provides a colorful portrait of Furtwangler’s friendly rival and intellectual sparring partner, Saloman Reinach, a French Jewish polymath.

Unlike Reinach, Furtwangler and the other brilliant and passionate 19th century scholars, many of our contemporary scholars, Curtis notes, adopt a snide and superior attitude toward this great work of art. But thanks to this engaging book, in which Curtis also gives us his own, very sensible, theories about the statue, we now have an enthusiastic and enlightening guide to one of the most awe-inspiring specimens of beauty ever created.