Today it is one of the most recognizable sculptures in the world. A two-meter figure of a woman, whose torso is naked, and her hips and legs are hidden under the fallen robe. It is believed to be an image of the ancient Greek goddess of love, but she is commonly referred to by the Roman name Venus.
Its main feature is the absence of hands, but it was this detail that made Venus, found on April 8, 1820 on the Greek island of Milos, a legend.
Find history
Strictly speaking, even the date (that is, April 8, 1820) is being questioned, but it is it that is, so to speak, generally accepted. According to researchers, it was on this day that the peasant Yorgos Kentrotas from Milos rummaged through the ruins of the ancient city and dug up a statue of Venus, divided into two parts.
German-American scientist Paul Carus believed that the landmark discovery was made in February 1820 by Yorgos Bottonis and his son Antonio in the ruins of an ancient theater. However, it is possible that Carus (he lived in the second half of the 19th century) simply trusted the later evidence too much.
According to Australian historian Edward Duyker, the statue was found by a certain Theodoros Kendrotas. Duiker refers to an archival letter from the French consul to Milos, Louis Brest, written, however, forty years after the events. True, Yorgos is also present in this version: this is the son of Theodoros, who later demanded a reward from the French consul for the find.
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Additional details
In the version generally accepted today, there are also some circumstances that are not questioned. For example, a French sailor from the ship "Estafette" Olivier Voutier, who immediately recognized a masterpiece of masterpieces in the statue, was a witness to the peasant excavations and reported the find to his captain. He wrote to the Consul General of France in Smyrna, and Louis Brest also entered into the correspondence. In the end, it comes to the French ambassador to Istanbul, Marquis de Riviera, who decides that Venus is still worth buying.
At the end of May, the same "Relay" was sent for the purchase, which was at hand. True, when this ship arrived at Milos, it turned out that the Turks had already decided everything for the French and even loaded the statue onto a ship (sometimes it is specified: onto a Russian ship) to take it to Istanbul. The secretary of the embassy, Viscount Marcellus, sent on an important mission, required all his diplomatic talent: for two days he persuaded the Turks to give the statue to him. And, surprisingly, he persuaded: Venus was on a French ship.
The "Relafette" sailed in the Eastern Mediterranean for a few more months, then the Marquis de Riviere took Venus for himself, who was just returning to his homeland. On the way back, the ex-ambassador went to Milos again and picked up a couple of missing pieces. Only in February the valuable statue came to Paris, de Rivière presented it to Louis XVIII, and the king gave it to the Louvre collection.
Where did the hands of Venus go?
Officially, it is believed that the statue found in the land of Milos had no hands from the start. The same Duiker mentions fragments of the left hand of Venus, one of which was a brush with an apple: this, by the way, gave some researchers a reason to claim that Venus was depicted at the time of the judgment of Paris. It is not known what mysterious "marble fragments" de Riviere took from Milos.
However, the less data, the more guesswork. In reconstructions, the goddess is made a spinner, a mirror is given to her hands, or she is placed next to the god of war Mars (or Ares, since we are talking about Ancient Greece), indicating that this could be a pair sculpture. Some generally believe that this is not Venus, but the goddess of victory, Nick.
The most romantic, of course, is the version that the hands of Venus were torn off by French sailors, who fought for the possession of the statue with local Turks in the port of Milos. Unfortunately, it is not confirmed by any documents. For the first time this became known in 1874 from the words of a lieutenant from a French ship. But this ship was in the Black Sea during the "fight for Venus" on Milos.
The path to glory
It should be noted that Venus de Milo was found quite in time. In 1815, Napoleon I Bonaparte was finally overthrown, and France had to return many of the treasures he had plundered over the years of conquests. For example, Venus de Medici returned to Italy, which was then considered the best example of ancient Greek sculpture. The French took this loss very hard.
And suddenly fate in the person of sailors and diplomats presented France with a new and already completely its Venus. A real PR campaign was launched to glorify the statue from Milos, which, of course, could not but bear fruit. By the end of the 19th century, the French statue eclipsed its sister from the Uffizi gallery. Criticism of Renoir could not change anything.
Venus immediately after getting to France began to acquire numerous myths. Everyone involved in the find tried to do this, and each of them, naturally, emphasized their merits. The memoirs of an officer (and a botanist by vocation) Dumont d Jurville, who was one of the first researchers of the statue, are relatively dispassionately written, but they do not contain many details of the circumstances of the find.
At first, Venus from Milos was generally perceived as one of the works of Praxiteles and attributed to the classical era (480? 323 BC).
Moreover, the statue seems to have been found with a pedestal on which the name of the real author, Agesander (or Alexander) from Antioch, who worked between 130 and 100 BC, was engraved. However, this pedestal was lost, it seems, even during transportation to France.
Venus de Milo has gone through a lot. She could have died during the Paris Commune in 1871, when public buildings burned one after another. The statue was then hidden in the basement of the police prefecture, which burned down. But Venus survived. In 1939, she, along with other treasures of the Louvre, was taken out of Paris and hid in the castle of Valence throughout the war. She now occupies an honorable and specially equipped place in the Louvre, attracting crowds of visitors who want to make sure that she still has no hands.
