Aphrodite in Milos
If there is one thing that made the island of Milos, in the south-west of the Cyclades, famous, it was the discovery of an extraordinary statue that ended up on display in room 346 of the Sully Wing of the Louvre Museum in Paris: the Venus de Milo.
Venus is the name of the goddess of love in the Roman pantheon, Aphrodite in the Greek one, and is, today, one of the most famous statues in the world and, as far as Venus-Aphrodite is concerned, it only competes with the no less famous Venus of Cnidus, a work of the sculptor Praxiteles. The difference is that the latter was carved around the fourth century BC and numerous Greek and Roman copies were made of it, while the one from Milos has been dated to around 120 BC, at the end of the Hellenistic period, and is attributed to Alexander of Antioch.
The sculpture was carved from marble from the neighbouring island of Paros, a material highly prized in ancient Greece. It is just over two metres high and weighs around nine hundred kilograms. The first thing that draws attention is the lack of arms, which are believed to have been lost during transport to France, and the posture of the goddess, which is not static, as she leans one of her legs, shifting all her weight to the other, while her body seems to trace an elegant “s” shape. Venus is shown half-naked, a tunic that wraps her hips falls towards her feet; her gaze, staring infinity, is projected through her tilted head. The curves of her body correspond to the then idealised prototype of feminine beauty. It is believed that with her right arm she made the gesture of trying to hold the tunic so that it would not fall to the ground while with the other arm she held the apple that was offered to her at the mythical Judgement of Paris. Even today, the exact location of its discovery is unknown. It is thought that it decorated an exedra at the entrance to the gymnasium, near the theatre, between the eastern gate of the ancient city walls and the retaining wall of the stadium. However, it is known that it was discovered accidentally in February 1820 by the peasant Giorgios Kentrotas. The statue was found broken into fragments, including a forearm with a hand and an apple. In Greek Μήλο, milo, means nothing else than apple, as well as coinciding with the name of the island.
The statue was acquired in the midst of a bitter controversy between French and Turks. At that time, the Aegean was still in the hands of the Ottoman Empire, so the sculpture was sold by Kentrotas to a priest named Macarius Verghis who, in turn, thought of offering it to an official of the Sublime Porte. Meanwhile, the French Navy's Admiral, Jules Dumont d'Urville, had landed in Milos, where he was informed of the discovery of the Venus. The French Admiral recognised the historical value that the sculpture could have and wrote to the French ambassador in Constantinople, the Marquis de la Rivière, Charles François de Riffardeau, persuading him to purchase the statue. The Marquis' representative arrived in Milos in time to cancel the sale that Kentrotas had already made, convincing him to retract and hand it over to the French. On 1 March of the following year, 1821, the Venus was loaded onto the schooner L'Estafette, which unloaded it in the port of Toulon and, from there, taken to Paris, where the Marquis de la Rivière offered it to the King of France, Louis XVIII, who gave it to the Louvre Museum. The Turks did not stop denouncing the acquisition as a fraud and unsuccessfully demanding the statue.
Once in the Paris museum, the Venus de Milo was restored for the first time, the pedestal was added and the nose, left foot and a toe of the right foot were retouched, as well as the surface of the marble was polished. But the arms were not reconstructed because the exact position they could have had was unknown. Between November 2009 and April 2010 a new restoration was conducted, removing the plaster additions and cleaning the surface. Then a paper was discovered under one of these additions, which indicated another previous restoration, dated April 5, 1936, carried out by a marble worker called Libeau. In addition to the original, kept at the Louvre, Milos has a couple of replicas of its Venus, one of which is on display at the Archaeological Museum of Milos, in Plaka, the second was erected, next to the road leading from Tripiti to Klima, in 2022, near the place where it was discovered.
© J.L.Nicolas
