Napoleon, who had little interest in art, liked to stand next to it so that honored guests could admire both him and the Apollo Belvedere at the same time. It was given a place of honor at the Louvre, where it became an essential source of guidance for French artists. Although now thought to be a Roman copy, the statue was then considered the embodiment of all the intellect, imagination and inspiration that created classical Greece. Among the thousands of works that were appropriated, the most admired and coveted was the Apollo Belvedere, which had been taken from the Vatican. They spread out across newly conquered territory to confiscate its greatest works of art and send them to the Louvre, which was soon christened the Musée Napoleon. And as it happened, a priceless masterpiece from the classical age of Greece was precisely what the Louvre most desperately wanted.īeginning in 1796 and continuing throughout his years in power, Napoleon had taken connoisseurs of art with him on his military campaigns. After all, the French consul in Athens, a man named Fauvel whom Forbin knew to be an infallible judge of antiquities, had declared it a priceless masterpiece from the classical age of Greece. The director of the Louvre, the Count de Forbin, could not have been more excited by the statue’s arrival. Louis, who was so fat he could not move except in a wheelchair, did not see his prize possession until several months later when it was briefly moved, for his benefit, to a small room accessible by wheelchair. The statue was sequestered in a back workshop of the Louvre.
On March 1, the Marquis de Rivière, the French ambassador to the Ottoman Turks, who had approved the purchase, obtained an audience with Louis XVIII, to whom he offered the statue in homage. (The name means Venus of Melos.) The discovery precipitated some frantic negotiations between French officials and the Greek authorities on the island, who eventually agreed to a price of 1,000 francs, roughly the cost, in those days, of a nice herd of goats.Īfter a leisurely voyage around the Mediterranean, the statue arrived in Paris in February 1821. The statue was uncovered on April 8, 1820, on Melos, an Aegean island halfway between Crete and the Greek mainland. The primary truth the French suppressed about the Venus de Milo was its sculptor’s name.
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The campaign wasn’t completely mendacious-the French had a good product and they knew how to sell it-but it wasn’t completely truthful, either. But the statue also owes its popularity to a propaganda campaign perpetrated by the French beginning in 1821. Then, of course, the missing arms make the statue instantly recognizable and give it what a mass marketer would call brand recognition. The Venus de Milo is in fact a glorious work of art. Some of the reasons for this popularity are obvious. In 1964, when France sent the statue on loan to Japan, more than 100,000 people came to greet the ship carrying her, and one and a half million people, on a moving sidewalk, were carried past her display. But she has also inspired artists such as Cézanne, Dali, Magritte, Clive Barker and Jim Dine, whose two large Venuses stand on Sixth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. Her image is reproduced in advertisements, on covers of CDs, as saltshakers, even as little rubber toys that squeak. The hordes of visitors who jam into her alcove in the Louvre museum in Paris every day are one proof of her popularity, but more telling is the way the statue has permeated our culture in art both high and low. The Venus de Milo is the most famous sculpture and, after the Mona Lisa, the most famous work of art in the world.
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