In the spring of 1820, on the Aegean island of Melos, an unsuspecting farmer was digging for marble building blocks when he unearthed the statue that would come to be known as the Venus de Milo. From the moment of its discovery a battle for possession ensued and was won, eventually, by the French. Touted by her keepers in the Louvre as the great classical find of the era, the sculpture gained instant celebrityβand yet its origins had yet to be documented or verified.
From the flurry of excitement surrounding her discovery, to the raging disputes over her authenticity, to the politics and personalities that have given rise to her mystique, Gregory Curtis has given us a riveting look at the embattled legacy of a beloved icon and a remarkable tribute to one of the worldβs great works of art.
From Publishers Weekly
In 1820 on the island of Melos, a young French naval officer and a local farmer discovered the hulking halves of an armless statue. The Venus de Milo has since graced car advertisements, adorned matchboxes and inspired artists from Dali to Jim Dine. Former Texas Monthly editor Curtis simply chalks up the Venus's omnipresence to its timeless beauty, and he impressively details an era when the statue seemed "less like a thing than an event." Relating how the French returned to Melos just in time to intercept a Russian boat bearing their treasure away, Curtis dismisses the mythic "fight on the beach" in which the Venus supposedly lost her arms; she had been found without them. Inspired by Johann Winckelmann's theories of Greek art, the Louvre's officials insisted on dating their acquisition to the classical age, rather than to the Hellenistic period of artistic decadence. Hence, the inscribed base that attributed the work to the Hellenistic sculptor Alexandros was conveniently "lost" for a time. For his part, Curtis ventures that the Venus once stood in the niche of a Greek gymnasium and held an apple, symbol of Melos and of the debate that launched the Trojan War. But more compellingly, his sense of a good anecdote revives the myriad characters (often shown among the 21 illustrations) who furiously debated the statue's origin, identity and even placement in the Louvre as late as the 20th century. Such scholars exuded "an enthusiasm for the statue, almost a gratitude for its presence in their lives." This enthusiasm, Curtis's work suggests, is what museum-goers maintain and contemporary critics too often forget; his judicious book may push them to remember.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
The Venus de Milo receives throngs of admirers every day in the Louvre, her white marble luminescent, her pose enigmatic since no one knows the position her missing arms once took. Every bit as iconic as the Mona Lisa , this powerful Greek statue has elicited far less modern research. This combination of ubiquitousness and invisibility inspired Curtis to take a fresh approach to the deliciously convoluted tale of the stone goddess' discovery by a French naval ensign on the unlovely Aegean island of Melos in 1820, and all the anxious and nefarious wrangling, debate, and controversy that followed, including the convenient disappearance of an inscribed base that attributed the statue not to one of Greece's golden age sculptors, as claimed, but rather to a "nobody" working in the civilization's declining years. His pleasure in his complex subject palpable on every sparkling page, Curtis parses nineteenth-century Europe's fervor for all things classical, provides gossipy profiles of amazingly eccentric officials and scholars, and, finally, renews our appreciation for a masterpiece as beautiful as it is mysterious. Donna Seaman
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