Evening Standard/GettyImagesĮven with the statue’s slight slouch, Venus de Milo stands at 6 feet, 8 inches tall. The ‘Venus de Milo’ is 6 feet, 8 inches tall. Venus de Milo went into hiding during World War II.īy the autumn of 1939, war threatened to descend on Paris, so Venus de Milo-along with some other priceless pieces, such as Winged Victory of Samothrace and Michelangelo’s Slaves-were whisked away for safekeeping at various châteaux in the French countryside. Who understands the trees? Who can comprehend the light?” 11. Thou art the familiar companion, the woman that each believes he knows, but that no man has ever understood, the wisest not more than the simple. It is thy sincerity to nature which makes thee all powerful, because nature appeals to all men. Thou art made of truth alone, outside of which there is neither strength nor beauty. Perhaps the most famous of Venus de Milo’s detractors, the celebrated Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir dismissed this delicate depiction of grace and female beauty as “ a big gendarme.” He created his own sculpture of Venus in 1914.Īuguste Rodin, however, was a different story: He wrote an entire essay titled “To the Venus de Milo” in which he said, “thou, thou art alive, and thy thoughts are the thoughts of a woman, not of some strange, superior being, artificial and imaginary. Renoir was not impressed by Venus de Milo. The ploy worked, and the piece was met with almost universal praise from artists and critics. In 1815, the French government returned that beloved sculpture, but in 1820, France embraced the chance to fill the hole its absence left in French culture and national pride, promoting Venus de Milo as being even greater than Venus de’ Medici upon her Louvre debut. Heritage Images/GettyImagesĭuring his conquests, Napoleon Bonaparte had plundered one of the finest examples of Greek sculpture, Venus de’ Medici, from Italy. Venus de Milo was meant to make up for a national embarrassment. To save face and better promote Venus de Milo-even at the cost of misinforming the public-the plinth was removed before it was presented to the king. This attribution would have placed the piece in the Classical period (5th through 4th centuries BCE), which was more respected artistically than the Hellenistic period. Sight unseen, early 19th century art historians decided the newly discovered Venus must have been the work of Greek artist Praxiteles, and publicized the work as such. The original plinth was ditched on purpose. quadrangular pillars about three feet high with a carved head at the top.” 8. But “most scholars today believe the sculpture’s arms already were missing when it was found by Voutier and the farmer,” wrote Elizabeth Nix on .Īccording to Curtis, Kentrotas found additional fragments as he dug out the statue, including “a marble hand holding an apple, a piece of a badly mutilated arm, and two herms. One theory has it that the arms were broken off during a scuffle between French and Turkish troops as the statue was removed from Milos another theory suggests that as Venus de Milo was being reassembled, the arms were discarded for having a “rougher” appearance. Alexandros of Antioch is credited with the statue’s creation. ”Voutier gave him a small bribe to dig up the statue instead.” He apparently had to pay Kentrotas a couple more times to unearth all the pieces of the statue. “Its odd shape made it useless as a building block, so the farmer had decided to cover it over,” Curtis wrote. When Voutier got there, he spied the upper half of a statue. When the officer got closer, he saw that Kentrotas was covering up whatever he had seen with dirt. His posture was curious enough that Voutier went to look himself.” noticed that the man had stopped digging for the moment and was staring at something in a niche he had uncovered in the wall. According to Curtis Gregory in his book Disarmed, “Voutier. It almost got reburied.Ī French naval officer named Olivier Voutier and two sailors were indulging in the then-new pursuit of archaeology among the same ruins in which Kentrotas was looking for rocks. On April 8, 1820, a farmer named Yorgos Kentrotas-who was plucking stones from a wall to use on his farm-came across the statue in pieces within the ruins of an ancient city on the island of Milos (formerly known as Melos). The statue is named in part for where it was discovered. Nonetheless, the Roman-inspired name Venus de Milo caught on. However, the Greeks would have called this deity Aphrodite. It’s popularly believed that this Grecian statue depicts the Greek goddess of love and beauty, who was often rendered half-naked. ‘Venus de Milo.’ / Todd Gipstein/GettyImages
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