If the history of art could be condensed into the story of one masterpiece, none would serve better than the Venus de Milo. Armless, half nude, she is the world's most recognizable work of art, the centerpiece of Paris' Louvre since her arrival there in the early 1820s.
Almost from the moment it was uncovered in a farmer's pasture on an insignificant Greek island in the spring of 1820, the Venus (who may however be an Amphitrite) de Milo has stirred high drama, and high farce. Throughout her history she has aroused fervid nationalism - in France, not in Greece.
Six feet 7 inches tall, carved from two blocks of marble set on top of each other, the statue was nicked and scraped everywhere. Four pieces were broken from her hips, the knot from the back of her hair had been broken and repaired, her left nipple gouged, her earlobes gone - presumably when robbers ripped away the earrings she wore. And her arms and left foot were missing.
In his very readable and enlightening Story of Venus de Milo, Gregory Curtis, longtime editor of Texas Monthly, tells how national pride and self-interest suppressed the truths of art and history - and how the truth, welcome or not, eventually swept away the prejudices and deceits of past generations.
It's not true, for example, though often reported even today, that the statue was spirited onto a French ship after a pitched battle on the beach at Milos against Turkish marines under the "evil priest" Oconomos.
Also not true is the story that the statue was dug out of a farmer's lime kiln, waiting to be burned. (I heard that one from a tour guide at the Louvre just two years ago.)
Found with the statue were part of an arm, a hand holding an apple, and a pair of small herns, decorative columns topped with carved heads. One of the herns fit conveniently into the broken corner of the statue, where an inscription in Greek read: "Alexandros son of Menides citizen of Antioch made the statue."
Inconveniently, however, Antioch wasn't founded until 280 B.C., well after the fourth century classical age. Inconvenient, because this Venus arrived in Paris at the height of a European craze for classical Greek art. The greatness of classical Greek art flowed, it was believed, from the pure democracy of that age and degenerated in the years following Alexander the Great. A Venus of the classical age was a national pride. A Venus by Alexandros of Antioch was a French embarrassment.
Conveniently, the hern with its inscription simply disappeared, and has never been found again, despite exhaustive searches of the Louvre.
One man stole credit for discovering the statue and became a national celebrity, and an admiral. Curtis' story is filled with striking and compelling characters, many esteemed scholars and cultural figures who are eclipsed and discredited today, all of them treated with the most even of hands. One of the chief pleasures of this lively and engaging book is its author's empathy with, and compassion for, these figures of the benighted past.
Most engaging, however, is the story of how an obscure statue, probably a copy, not mentioned in any ancient text, has so powerfully captured and held the public imagination since the 1820s. When France loaned the Venus de Milo to Japan in 1964, 60,000 people came just to watch it dock, and 1.5-million viewed it from a moving sidewalk.
"They come," Curtis says of the masses that arrive at the Louvre each day to see her, "because the statue is beautiful in a way that even an untrained eye immediately understands."
Reviewer David Walton is a writer who lives in Pittsburgh.
"Disarmed: The Story of the Venus de Milo," by Gregory Curtis, Knopf, $24, 247 pages.
