For over two hundred years, it has intrigued – as much as it fascinated – visitors to the Louvre Museum. The Venus de Milo is surrounded by mysteries – is it Aphrodite or another goddess? Who is its author?… So many enigmas that have made people talk about it and have elevated it to the rank of icon. And it is not the Mona Lisa who will contradict us !
Its discovery alone is the stuff of romance. On April 8, 1820, in Milo (or Melos in Greek), an island in the Cyclades in the Aegean Sea, Olivier Voutier, a student in the French navy, disembarked from the Estafette and learned that Yorgos Kentrotas, a Greek farmer, had just unearthed an underground chamber. Surprise! There lay a statue of a woman in a puzzle.
The news reached the ears of the Marquis de Rivière, French ambassador to Constantinople, and he sent his secretary, Viscount Marcellus, to buy the Venus . The latter was offered in 1821 to King Louis XVIII who entrusted it to the Louvre. A little over two meters high, this goddess of the most beautiful Parian marble, of a translucent white, impresses with its beauty.But it's broken! Her left foot is missing. And her arms? Where are they? We don't know. If they existed, they were never found. The reason for this? The Venus de Milo was made using "the technique of added pieces", Ludovic Laugier, heritage curator of the Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities at the Louvre Museum, tells us in Qu'est-ce qu'elle a donc cette Vénus de Milo ( published by Actes Sud Junior / Musée du Louvre, 2021 ). "To assemble the different parts of a statue together," the curator explains, "no cement or mortar was used: they were adjusted very precisely and held together using fixing tenons placed in cavities called mortises."It is therefore thought that the missing arms of the Venus had been sculpted separately. Moreover, on the left, a mortise is still visible at shoulder level. On the right, on the side of the statue, another hole had also been dug and then filled in the 19th century . But here again, we are not sure of anything!
Marble sculpture from Paros • 2.02 m high • Coll. Musée du Louvre, Paris • Photo Wikimedia Commons
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