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arts-dance · 6 years ago

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What happened to the Venus de Milo’s arms?

Elizabeth Nix Jun 22, 2015

One of the most famous examples of ancient Greek sculpture, the Venus de Milo is immediately recognizable by its missing arms and popularly believed to represent Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, who was known to the Romans as Venus. The artwork was discovered in 1820 on the Aegean island of Melos (also called Milos). An ensign in the French navy, Olivier Voutier, whose ship was anchored in the harbor at Melos, decided to kill time one day by going ashore and searching for antiquities. While digging near the ruins of an ancient theater, Voutier noticed that a local farmer, who’d been removing stones from a nearby wall for use as building materials, seemed to have found something inside the wall. Upon investigating, Voutier learned the farmer had located the top half of a statue of a woman. Recognizing the statue as potentially significant, the Frenchman, with the farmer’s help, unearthed its lower half not far away. Voutier told his superiors about the discovery and the French acquired the artwork, which came to be known as the Venus de Milo, for a relatively modest sum. It arrived in France in 1821 and was presented to Louis XVIII, who donated it to the Louvre Museum, where it remains today.

The Louvre initially promoted the Venus de Milo as a masterpiece from the Greek classical era. Now, however, the Venus de Milo is thought to have been produced around 100 B.C., during a later period known as the Hellenistic age. Originally carved in two blocks of marble then fitted together, the statue stands 6 feet 7 inches from head to toe and is the creation of an artist named Alexandros of Antioch, about whom little is known.

As for the Venus de Milo’s missing limbs, there long have been claims they were broken off in 1820 during a fight on the shore of Melos, as French and Turkish sailors vied for possession of the artwork. But, in fact, most scholars today believe the sculpture’s arms already were missing when it was found by Voutier and the farmer. (Also missing now is the metal jewelry scholars say decorated the statue’s arms, head and ears in ancient times, as well as the colored paint on its face, hair and drapery.) Speculation remains about the Venus de Milo’s original pose, although evidence suggests its once held an apple in its left hand.

It’s an appropriate metaphor for the goddess of love and reproduction. “Something new is coming into being where before there was at most an amorphous mass … Women create thread; they somehow pull it out of nowhere, just as they produce babies out of nowhere,” writes Barber. For the ancient Greeks, spinning had yet another association with sex. Greek vases depict prostitutes spinning. It was a productive occupation while waiting for clients. “In the same manner that sex was the trade of the prostitutes, so too was the making of textiles,” writes art historian Rachel Rosenzweig in her 2004 book Worshipping Aphrodite. So a spinning Venus seems theoretically plausible. But would the pose actually work? In the 19th century, a sculptor might have tested the idea with a plaster cast. In the 21st, we have a cheaper, simpler, more versatile option. Cosmo Wenman is a San Diego designer and artist (and an old friend) who’s on a crusade to get museums to publicly release 3-D digital scans of their public-domain sculptures. One of his arguments for the social value of releasing scans is that they’d allow artists and others to remake existing works in imaginative ways. Using his own scans, I knew that he’d restored the lost nose on the Louvre’s Inopos bust of Alexander the Great and had remixed elements of classical sculptures in a contemporary bust he’d done for a client. I also knew he had made a 3-D photocapture of the Venus from a highly accurate 1850 plaster cast now housed in the Skulpturhalle Basel in Switzerland. Cosmo had the know-how and the digital raw material to recreate Venus de Milo as a spinner. I hired him to try it. Consulting Barber’s sketch, ancient images of spinning available online, and a YouTube tutorial on how to use a simple drop spindle, he worked with a digital anatomist to develop a 3-D rendering that preserved the statue’s existing pose intact. After a few iterations, the result was a convincing digital model. We then hired the 3-D printing service Shapeways to make a tabletop replica in white plastic. (The tools had to be printed separately; some assembly required.) Turning the computer model into a tangible sculpture provided unexpected insights into the original. Cosmo quickly realized that neither the distaff and wad of fibers nor the spindle could have been made of marble. (“Maybe she lost her arms,” he quips, “because some dope did, in fact, put a 30-pound marble ball on the top of the distaff, and 20 pounds of extra weight from a solid marble spindle hanging on her right arm.”) For our tabletop Venus, he imagined the tools instead as lightweight wood, painted gold. Rather than mundane wool thread, he used a gold chain appropriate for a goddess. The gold, he observes, also draws the modern viewer’s eye “away from the novelty of the arms, putting the viewer’s focus on the tools and the activity, where it would have been intended.” The re-creation provides a plausible answer to a question posed by the original advocate of a spinning Venus, archeologist Elmer G. Suhr, in the 1950s and 1960s. Suhr identified many classical sculptures with poses suggestive of spinning, but none of them had implements. Where did the tools go? Suhr argued that “the equipment of a spinner must have been a disturbing element to the artist,” who simply dispensed with the distaffs and spindles, assuming that “everyone in ancient times was sufficiently familiar with the process” to recognize the stance and gestures. Cosmo’s version suggests a better answer: that the tools were separate accessories made of perishable materials or precious metals and have simply been lost or stolen. None of this proves, of course, that the Venus de Milo was originally a spinner. (Citing a crudely carved hand holding an apple that was found on the same site, Curtis in his book argues for that theory; the poor carving, he suggests, is because the hand was meant to be mostly hidden against the wall of a niche.) But the replica demonstrates plausibility.

https://www.history.com/news/what-happened-to-the-venus-de-milos-arms

#Venus de Milo

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