The Venus of Milo

MORE than half a century has elapsed since the now famous statue was found buried under nameless ruins at Milo, anciently called Melos,—a poor little island of the Grecian Archipelago, which traded formerly in yellow earth, used for pigment and in medicine. How a spot so very moderately endowed by nature as Melos happened to contain this masterpiece of art does not appear in history. All that is known with certainty about the statue might be told in a few words. But this obscurity of origin, and much needless mystery beside, which has been added in our day, together with the effects of the barbarous handling dealt it since it was unearthed, have not prevented the Venus of Milo from becoming the most popular of all antiques. It was brought to Paris in 1821. No sooner were its splendid fragments exposed to public view than — for all the faulty manner in which they were put together, exhibiting the figure out of equilibrium, and in spite of its pitiably mutilated condition, deprived as it is of arms — the Venus of Milo at once eclipsed tlie fame of the Apollo Belvidere and the Venus de’ Medici, which our ancestors esteemed the ne plus ultra of perfection. It should, however, be confessed that when the last-named reigned supreme, Greek and Roman art were not distinguished from each other. The difference which actually exists between them was suspected only in the second half of the last century. Circumstances, moreover, were very favorable to the impression produced by the Venus of Milo. It appeared at the beginning of a transition period in affairs of taste, —a transition yet so far from its conclusion that our age may be said to enjoy something like the middle of the struggle.

Winckelmann had already drawn a line between late and early art, but when this Venus came to light the critics had left some of his false theories behind, and ventured to admire a work referred to the middle period of Greek art. As for the public, their education was not so far advanced as to allow them to suspect that were the Venus nearer perfection they might have liked her less! Modern art was in a predicament which will be better understood by taking into account the influence of the Renaissance. All antiquity was venerated at the epoch of the Renaissance, but a preference was shown for the age of the Antonines, and to this unlucky preference we owe nearly all that tarnished the revival of the classic.

Count Caylus, a learned amateur and clever draughtsman, was the first to recommend a judicious selection from the mass of the antique. Caylus pointed out how the Antinous and Laocoon differ in style from the Trophomère Hermes and Borghese Mars. To this critic, and to his friend, the sculptor Girard-on, was due a revolt against academic pedantry, and their intelligent initiative prompted the admirable productions of the socalled Louis XVI. style in French sculpture. But this hopeful movement was superseded by the pretentious schools of David and Canova. David’s heroes grinned and gesticulated, like actors at a fair. Canova’s figures stretched their slender limbs, which, by a picturesque comparison of the day, were likened to “peeled radishes”!

The corruptions of Roman art had been revived at, the beginning of the Renaissance, but the taste of the first French empire affected to remount to the sources of Greek inspiration, and this theoretical advance was largely to be attributed to the effect of Winckelmann’s writings. In him were reconciled the poetic faculty and vast erudition; he revolutionized the field of criticism, and formed the taste of his contemporaries for correct models and for a purely Greek ideal of the beautiful. But the art fostered by Winckelmann’s tuition was disinherited at birth from a capacity to originate anything. The practical application of Winckelmann’s rules quenched originality, and produced flat plagiarism from the antique. In painting, more particularly, he promoted a frigid and incongruous style, with a false tendency to statuesque effect. The noble simplicity of high Greek art was still so far from being generally understood when Lord Elgin fortunately robbed the Parthenon that even the spoils of Athens were received in England with universal contempt. Lord Elgin was reproached with having outwitted himself in his dealings with the Turks. Knowledge and appreciation of the antique have been steadily gaining since that epoch. The revelation of the Elgin marbles has been supplemented by the dispersion of the Campana collection; yet the mass of the public, and even some academies, admire all these things with small conviction. We may well be curious to inquire how the Venus of Milo has produced an effect so contrary. Her image is carried throughout the civilized world, and is enshrined almost as that of a household deity.

When we attempt to analyze her charms, we observe that the Venus of Milo is a figure modeled on the androgynous or adolescent type, —a type invented by the ancients to express the supernatural. It combined the elements of beauty which are common to both sexes in the first age of life, and in this shape were imaged the immortals, who continually renew their youth, but never pass its boundary. Up to Alexander’s time (that is, the fourth century B. C.), a strongly marked religious prejudice forbade the literal rendering of natural forms. The dictates of artistic taste alone might not have been sufficient to prevent art from degenerating into extremes of sensuousness or harshness without the force of hieratic principle, which exacted conformity to the rules of dogma. Hellenic art was inspired, monopolized, and administered by the aristocratic and sacerdotal class, composing the Athenian oligarchy, and was thus carried to a height of excellence among the Greeks which has never been excelled in any other country, at any other age of the world’s history. It was Greek philosophy which held the arts in vassalage, and which prompted the transmission of the Asiatic dogma of the dual or mixed nature of the divinity through the marvelous ideal of the androgyne. This substituted the youthful ideal for the feminine, in opposition to the virile or mature. Bacchus, Mercury, Atalanta, and Diana are all in its category. In them we recognize an equal grace of boy or maiden. Womankind, as such, we know was scorned among the Greeks, Her counterfeit presentment was not admitted in the arts until they were so modified by the Seleucides and Ptolemies that portraiture and realism were associated with the ideal. This was the epoch which produced the Venus of Milo. The composition conforms to old traditions of hieratic art, with a strong dose of realism. The dominant characteristic of Phidias, and of art in its first period, was the aspiration for repose, so beautifully and completely expressed by the Trophonian Hermes, and the Ares, or Borghese Mars.² Their faultless features are in perfect harmony, and breathe a passionless calm which very nearly results in apathy.

A return to the golden age, which had antedated mundane existence, was the dearest wish of the pagan world. At that happy but fabulous epoch, the earth was said to have yielded fruits unfilled, the seas were ever calm, death was known only as a gentle sleep. The Venus of Milo is emancipated from this sentiment. A very perceptible inequality between the two sides of the face together with a slight strabismus in the eyes heighten the expression. The vigorously molded form recalls the popular and rustic, not the aristocratic type; but its exuberance is chastened by a return to severer outlines. The shoulders are a trifle square, the hips a trifle narrow; while the androgynism is still more strongly emphasized by the extraordinary length and rigidity of the lower limbs, contrasting with the suppleness and movement of the torso. The attitude is of that sort described by Leonardo da Vinci as one more naturally assumed in youth. The weight of the body is thrown upon one limb, and in this case is supported by a foot of manly size. The left knee is bent and the left foot raised, and both that and the object on which it rested are missing. The figure is half draped. In some repetitions of the same subject the entire form is enveloped in light, transparent drapery. By the variation in this case the world has gained the most magnificent model of the female torso in existence.

In Greek hieroglyphics, the thin or partial drapery (penos) gives the designation of the female element in Plato’s trinity,— Penia, the indigent, who brings forth Eros, or actual present life. This was Plato’s rendering of the Aryan dogma of the genesis of life, referring to the positive and negative principles in every sense. Poros and Penia, or the past and future, by a change of terms stand for rich and poor; for all acquirement is of the past, and the future owns not even shape; but it grows into shape, and the fleeting present moment is the product of the increase and decrease of time. In clay statuettes of the period, the notion of growth or increase is rendered by a downright Ottoman obesity in the nude figure of the goddess, which is elegantly replaced by the hieroglyphic of the fillet on tlio hair, dema, which word also indicates the idea of the fat and vulgar. In Latin this representative divinity is called Fatua. The Venus de’ Medici is of this class, and displays a sensuousness quite foreign to the Venus of Milo. The identification of the latter is very difficult, from the deficiency of arms to give evidence of gesture, and from the want of some distinguishing attribute. There is the fillet on the hair, and the figure is half draped; there are no other indications afforded us. The right arm has been removed midway towards the elbow; the left one is broken off even with the shoulder, and traces of a metallic bolt are plainly visible. The stumps of the arms have acquired the same tint ns the surface marble, from which we might infer the fracture to be of ancient date. It is not unlikely that the arms had been restored more than once. There is internal proof that the statue remained upon its pedestal when the temple overhead was destroyed by some catastrophe (whether fire or earthquake). Spots of erosion, with which the breast and shoulders are pitted, indicate that they were exposed to long-continued dropping of moisture, filtered through the soil and through the interstices of the masonry, to which was due the preservation of this piece of sculpture. But we are not reduced to speculation on the question. It is now an established fact that the first ray of light which penetrated the subterranean chamber of the Venus disclosed her standing on her pedestal and without arms, as we now see her. So affirmed the earliest eye-witness of the discovery, M. Brest. It is of course to be regretted that a witness so important was more than seventy years of age before he met with his reporter, in the person of M. Doussault,³ one of a party assembled at the French legation at Athens in 1849, who took down notes (now for the first time published) of the detailed narrative of M. Brest, resident consul of France at Milo since 1820.

It will be found by comparison that his statements conflict in some particulars with the received official reports given out by French naval officers, and others who inspected the ground almost simultaneously with himself, and who were concerned in the transportation of the statue. Some facts also appear which have hitherto been passed over in silence, and one of these facts is significant. It has not been mentioned that the underground receptacle in which the Venus of Milo was discovered was closed in with vaulted masonry. The walls, of a quadrilateral construction, were then still remaining, and terminated in a hemicycle. This construction was simply the crypt of a Christian church of the seventh century of our era.

M. Brest related that a certain peasant (George by name), while endeavoring to uproot a pistachio-tree on sloping ground, below the acropolis at Milo, saw the earth crumble at his feet, disclosing, as he described it, a “cave peopled with white phantoms.” This he at once communicated to the French consul, who proceeded to the spot, and looked down upon the incomparable Venus, upright upon her pedestal, in the centre of her vaulted niche. The niche measured about twice her height, and was spacious enough to contain, beside the central figure, three Hermes of unequal stature. The walls were colored a deep red, and were hung with models of arms, legs, heads, and figurines, as modern shrines are hung with similar objects, ex voto. Eighteen boxes of such fragments and sculptures here collected were shipped by the French consul to the port of Toulon. He was never notified of their arrival. If they are still in existence, they remain unknown to the public.

The supposed transformation of the statue from a Venus to a Madonna was a sort of transformation which was neither rare nor difficult. An American critic ⁴ has remarked that no shrine of Venus ever existed at Melos. Perhaps not in the peculiar sense attributed to Aphrodite; but Aphrodite, when not particularly designated, was confounded with Venus Pandemos, who rises from the shades, and is akin to Venus Dionæa, or Persephone, mother of Aphrodite. All these infernal or under-ground divinities, such as Persephone (or Proserpine), are allegorical of the phenomena of nature in the ceaseless alternation of the seasons. However the fictitious characters of mythology, folk-lore, and tradition tend to mix themselves up in complicated histories, they can always be referred to principles of increase and decrease, derived from observation of the natural division of time and of solar and lunar metamorphoses. There are numerous classic fables beginning with the incident of swallowing the seed of a pomegranate or apple, and they are of the class of myths which describe the awakening of nature after the death-like trance of winter. The ancients had a fable which figured the rising sun as a young female slave, who changed sex at noonday, at which moment in his course the Greeks styled the sun the “ afflicted,” or the “ suspended.” The fugitive, who was pursued across the heavens, was overtaken in male form, and crucified at night. In her flight she dropped one of her golden slippers. Every language owns a patois, and in the Tyrol (one of the radiating centres of myths) this one is perpetuated in the history of Saint Affliction,— a bearded virgin nailed upon the cross. Her effigy is sometimes found with the strange legend, “ Salvator mundi.” The saint is always represented with but one shoe; the other has fallen off, and is reverently appropriated, as a relic, by a poor fiddler kneeling at her feet, of whom it is related that he soothed the martyr’s suffering by his melody. Thus also Baaltis, the Phoenician bearded moon goddess, has reappeared in Spain as Santa Paula, another bearded virgin.⁵ And the priests of the bearded Venus of Anathonte (described by Macrobius) were disguised in female attire, an example followed by the robing of the Christian clergy. All these customs and delineations, as well as the cruder representations of Pompeian frescoes and bronzes, and of the potteries of Nola, are but variations to express the dual divine nature, which in archaic Cypriote monuments is figured in two individual deities associated together, namely, Hercules and Omphale. M. Ravaisson, keeper of antiques at the Louvre, in his official report upon the statue of the Venus of Milo, which he published in 1871, has dilated on the uncorrupted early myth, which would assign grace and sweetness, personified in Venus, as the rightful mate of force and courage, personified by Mars; and argues for the hypothesis of Quatremer de Quincy that the Venus of Milo was originally grouped with a figure of Mars, whom, by a graceful gesture, she offers to disarm.

The reputation of Venus as a faithful wife is inferred from the fact that Greek mothers invoked hef at the marriage of their daughters, and that Hypermnestra is quoted as the model of faithful wives, the only one of the Danaides who saved her spouse by disobedience to her father. Hypermnestra, we are reminded, having been judged and absolved of her crime by the Argives, vowed a statue to Venus. M. Ravaisson does not observe that all the proofs which he puts forward of the estimable and matronly vocation of the household Venus go to affirm the supernatural dualism which combines masculine force and vigor with the feminine qualities exhibited in one single form. Thus Hercules, when represented alone, was feminized, and was scarcely to be distinguished from Bacchus; and this idealized image of Hercules referred to his double nature, and implied Omphale.

If, indeed, the Venus of Milo ever formed part of a group, it was at a very remote period. The pedestal on which the statue was placed was of proportions to accommodate but one figure. The remains of a left arm and hand were found in its neighborhood. They are of vile workmanship, and are evidently examples of the later style of sculpture in the period of its decline; but although of vile • workmanship they have their value as indications of the manner in which we may venture to reconstruct the attitude and gesture in imagination, taking this substitute to be an ancient restoration of the original. The left hand grasps an apple painted green. M. Brest declared that he saw arms and a hand with a green apple in the crypt, but he was unaware whether this now displayed in a glass case near the statue was the same. The vexed question of the arms has been much discussed, and some new assertion or hypothesis arises very frequently, without certainty being yet attained. We may be confident, however, that M. Brest saw an apple, and that the apple was green. Now the medals of the isle of Melos bear the image of a pomegranate,—Melos, which derived the appellation from the yellow pigment or ochre already mentioned, and which was the natural production of its soil; but the name was also consonant with the word for apple, and was conveyed by the emblem of that fruit. This sort of play on words was very common with the Greeks, and their use of hieroglyphic signs, phonetically read, was in fact the source of modern heraldic blazonry.

The color of the object in the hand of this divinity is exceedingly suggestive. The Greeks had an alphabet of color, but their polychromy is so little understood that color has actually been omitted from the plates in many standard works on archæology. The most undecided and evanescent of all hues, the grayish-green which is seen in the sky at early morning, when shades of night are paling, is, in the language of many nations, associated with the tint of springing verdure and with tender green, such as we call apple-green. It belongs to the first Aurora in Vedic traditions, and is the distinctive emblem of the rising or morning Venus (the Venus Pandemos); while Venus Urania had as her attribute a deep violet-purple, which expressed the maximum of intensity of life and glory.

The familiar attribute of Aphrodite (or Venus Pandemos) was a dove; but in the continuous chain of mythology, reappearing in folk - lore and popular legends, we find, beside the dove, many other gray, dove-colored, ashy-hued, and speckled creatures, figuring in comic or terrible fictions, in which we detect references to Aphrodite, or to her nearest kin. These fictions vary exceedingly, but there is always something of a family likeness. The hero or heroine of the tale wears a gray disguise. There are always two wicked sisters or cruel brothers, who persecute their victim, whom they leave pining in the chimney corner; and finally, at some part of her career, this victim invariably loses one shoe or sandal. This is a point which nearly concerns us. The practice of hanging a stocking, or leaving a shoe, beside the hearth at Christmas Eve is one of our pagan traditions; and the superstition of throwing a shoe after a bride for “good luck” is another remnant of similar associations.

The reader is left to fill out for himself the long catalogue of tales turning on the incident of losing a slipper. The prettiest of them all is the story of Cinderella. A clue to all such legends seems to be offered in the fact that in Oriental dialect the household drudge, or ember sprite (who is represented by the large flat stone on which to this day Arabs and Cypriotes bake cakes, which serve as bread), is by name Askéra, the sandal; surnamed, beside, Gastrokheir, the worker.

The humblest essentials of life, the lowliest and at the same time most useful, that is, the sandal and the hearthstone, are symbols of the housewife’s cares. The hearth-stone stands for daily bread. The season of winter solstice is sacred to the household or hearth-stone deity, and she is called mother of the new year. She preserved her virginity, and was fabled to fabricate her numerous offspring by hand. This creative power of the hand was perpetuated in antique and mediaeval art, as it is in ceremonials of our religion. The word for hand In old Greek and Babylonian dialect was mare, whence the name of Mary, the “handmaid” or “worker.” In Christian catacombs this name is transcribed by the delineation of an enormous pair of hands. There are Cyprian and Syrian varieties of the household divinity,— Myrrha, Mariamne, and Miriam. The Mariamnes carry an infant on the left arm. There is also the Phoenician Rebecca, whose name signifies increase, or exaltation of the humble. There is also Fatua, whose emblem is a goose, and who is noted for gifts and increase of substance. This antique Mother Goose, otherwise Fatua, reappears as the modern fairy, or fate, of the fortunetellers. These are the minor and anything but imposing sisterhood of Venus Pandemos, who was a divinity of the sympathetic and endearing sort. The cold abstractions which modern art quarries with effort from a dictionary of classics are but feeble reflections of the glowing life of Greece, which animated marble, and informed its “tenements of clay ” with some undying myths.

The myths sprang from an intense consciousness of humanity and of supernatural influences, embodied sometimes in one form, sometimes in another, and which ended by transferring its instinctive adoration to the Holy Virgin and the saints of Christendom. The transition was the most natural thing in the world, but was not left to chance. The fusion of the old and new religion was promoted by the Christian Greek romance writers, and the Oriental craving for the marvelous was satisfied by something resembling the policy which permits spoiled children to take their toys to school. In the first five or seven centuries of our era novels were produced to recommend the worship of images, and Xenophon of Ephesus and some other writers were scarcely more than pagan in morals or in faith. At a period when such accommodation of the gospel was not only possible, but was an almost universal practice, the piece of sculpture so highly valued and long worshiped at Apple Island received a new consecration. Under another title, it was adapted to personate the Madonna, and was again worshiped and invoked as the saint protecting the household and the home. To transform the Venus to a Madonna, the sacrifice of the arms was requisite; and if modern arms were those substituted, supporting a wooden image of the divine infant, and if the statue were enveloped in real drapery, which was a custom with the Greeks (perpetuated from the earliest known figures of the gods, which were termed Dedalia), it is easy to infer that such perishable materials disappeared long ago, from the action of the same moisture which has so profoundly marked the stone. In the character of a Madonna, the Venus was doubtless crowned and otherwise ornamented. Traces of the addition of eardrops are perceptible.

The national female type presented in the figure still exists in the lovely valley of Cytherea at Cyprus, and also along the banks of the Orontes, at Aleppo, and at Damascus. It belongs to the race originating on the Sangarius, a river flowing into the Black Sea. Its name, borrowed from the nymph Sangaria (mother of Atys), is the equivalent of the name Askéra, the sandal. To this spot is traced a beautiful and vigorous race, whence sprang the Shepherd kings of Egypt, who were driven northward by Cyrus after two thousand years of domination and of contest. Then the incorrigible wanderers arrived in the middle of France by way of the Danube. They have left their image in Sicily, Crete, and Thrace. In Wallachia and Moldavia their type of “ ardent blondes ” remains contrasted, as in Palestine, with swarthy tribes. This people carried everywhere the arts of the Phoenicians, and spread the civilization with which they had so long been in contact.

Widely scattered, and yet mysterious, was this nation of Chetans, Genæ, Cingetæ, whose name both in Hebrew and in English signifies doors or gates. It is certain that they adored the double gates of Janus, which opened east and west, and were made of horn and ivory. The oldest recorded prayer or invocation is that of the ivory gate, the gate of sunrise and of Venus Pandemos. Unless it be by such an association of ideas, the preservation of the image by the church in the litany of the Holy Virgin seems most unaccountable. We find in the litany the two epithets, “ Turris eburnea” and “ Janua cæli.”

In the preceding remarks we have endeavored to describe the evidence to be collected from some hitherto neglected details, and from those which are familiar, and which tend to prove the Venus of Milo to be an embodiment of the popular or universal Venus, “ the lowly who is to be exalted.” who was adopted as the protecting deity of the Isle of Melos, and represented with the apple, which transcribes her name phonetically; and we have furthermore endeavored to convey a notion of how this venerated image was adapted to the requirements of a new faith, which had not burst suddenly Upon the heathen world, but had been the object of its aspirations, and already intimated by countless prophecies, for centuries before its revelation.

How appropriate such adaptation was in this particular instance we may judge after a closer inspection of the work. There are numerous variations extant of the Venus of Milo, and three of these are incontestably superior to it in style. They are severally the Venuses of Falerone, of Brescia, and of Capua. The best of all is the Capuan Venus, of which the head is by far the finest example of fourth-century sculpture which has been preserved to modern times. Not one, however, of these admirable works exhibits a kindred pathos with that emanating from the features of the Venus of Milo. And not from the features only; the very flexion of the attitude, its tender inclination and uncertain movement, result in a vague but impressive sentiment of melancholy, which in itself suffices to determine the character of the divinity, and dissolve the mystery which envelops her.

Such poignant melancholy as her face betrays, — the supreme regret winch is the conclusion of all human experience, — Phidias knew it not! The superb Pallas (of the Naples Museum), brandishing her lance, confronts likewise the battle of life, but she is not pathetic. The goddess shows action; her features are more beautiful than those of Venus herself; a certain contracting of the brow hints at firm concentration of the will; less than this could scarcely be looked for in the aspect of one who is will itself personified. But it is the will of a royal dame, who wills not to be commanded. This Pallas is all of aristocratic Greece, when art reflected the calmness and elegance of the great, not omitting something of that atmosphere of mortal coldness peculiar to all classes who dominate their fellow-men. In the contrast and reverse of such characteristics of the first period of art, we find the secret of the immense popularity, that is, the universal sympathetic impression produced by the Venus of Milo.

The sentiment of suffering is of all sentiments the best comprehended by the multitude, and exerts for them the most powerful of all attractions. It was the general attribute of those popular prototypes of the universal Venus, to which allusion has already been made. All the housekeeping and care-taking sprites are

Krinos, or sadness, is signified by the name of the wild rose, which crowns the maternal saint of Christendom. Since the world was made, despondency has followed gladness; and while the wisdom of the ancients is becoming obsolete, the touch of nature outlives their philosophical abstractions, and “ comes home to our business and bosoms.” Realism in execution and realism in sentiment appeal more intimately than any other qualities in works of art ever can appeal to the perceptions of the mass of the public, winning their attention beyond the power of any other form of merit. The conventions which gave such elevation to the classic ideal are a dead letter in our day; so is the scholastic plagiarism of modern times. Yet the transfiguring of type in the antique ideal exerts a certain charm, even for the most unsophisticated intelligence.

Greek art, like Egyptian art, was a system of calligraphy, and was perfected to express with grace certain philosophical or metaphysical ideas. But beside this ideal system, we know that a realistic art existed, which is traceable, through recent disclosures of Schliemann and Di Cesnola, back to an origin which antedated our Christian era by something like five and twenty centuries.

A new revelation of this branch of art has been opened in the sepulchres of Tanagra (Bœotia). Some of the enchanting “ figurines ” discovered there are now in the collection of the Louvre,⁶ and display the antique, free, and expressive style which presently after the Alexandrine period absorbed and superseded the pure ideal, and flowered in such unsullied glory in the Venus of Milo. All tradition gives the arts a Phoenician origin; they were imported into Greece, and although nursed there to their most sublime climax of development were not permanently acclimated.

The pedants, testing the conception and execution of the Venus of Milo with the rules of high archaic and ideal Greek art, have reproached her with a Gothic tendency. The tendency exists, for Gothic art and heraldic science are the direct heirs of the Phoenician hieroglyphic or expressive art, which has never died out, and which was represented in plastic and ceramic arts at Nola, and at Tanagra, and at other centres of production. The vitality was in the popular types, not in the ideal of repose. Only a concurrence of favoring circumstances made the barren rocks of Attica to flourish for a time.

The grandeur of the Greeks proved in its development to be fatal to its cradle. For its narrow limits were not to be extended, and art departed from Greece with Alexander’s victorious soldiery, and was never to be restored again to its miniature republics, which were fatally overshadowed by the rivalry of Alexandria and Antioch.

Alexander the Great diffused Greek influences abroad, and gave them new centres. Athens was reduced to the rank of a simple provincial town, and the sceptre of fashion passed to other hands. Athens had then no more attraction for the brilliant pleiades of artists who reflected glory on her in the days gone by, for Athens was impoverished. Art may exist, under some conditions without freedom, but never without wealth; for it has its commercial side, which renders it, dependent on riches. Hellenic art left its monuments behind, and emigrated to the new Greek empire and to Rome. It was always beautiful, but far less noble than before, and more complex.

When the divine creations of its first period deigned to make a gesture, it was done with the gravity and dignity of a priest before the altar; but the times were greatly changed before the Venus of Milo. The human element preponderated in plastic art,expression dawned, and portraiture appeared. We possess no authentic portraits previous to Alexander’s time. It is now established that the fine profile which figures on his medals represents Minerva. The coins of his father, Philip, were stamped with an Apollo’s head. Something of each may have lurked under features intentionally idealized, but nothing is more uncertain.

In Syria and in Egypt, on the contrary, the Greek rulers, being likened to the gods by their new subjects, ventured to substitute their own images on monuments and coins. The illustrious leaders of the Roman republic seduced art into courses less worthy than pursuit of the ideal, but infinitely more lucrative. Art supplied portraiture and licentious productions for the satisfaction of the wealthy traders of Alexandria and luxurious citizens of Rome. A revolution like this took place in Europe, when the increase of fortunes in Italy and the decline of religious faith forced art to desert the churches, and seek service with rich commoners at Venice or Florence, and to flatter the vanity of the lavish mistresses of Francis I. and Henry II. What was lost in devotion was made up for by gain in movement, in animation, in intensity of expression, and in the new element of reality. When the arts returned to the bosom of the church, it carried thither outer air and the mundane types which it had learned to render with more fidelity than refinement. The divine was made human, and the pathetic sentiment took its place in art. With this sentiment the Venus of Milo is preëminently endowed, and thus is composed the simple magic with which she touches the hearts which are thrilling to-day to the roll of the drum, or the roar and murmur of human life in modern Babylon. Human life, wherever we find it, carries the same heart, under all its protean disguises; and the people’s Venus is still the people’s Venus, in virtue of that pathetic look.

It remains to mention the greatest singularity attaching to the statue, and that is its being sculptured from two separate blocks of marble, slightly dissimilar in quality of grain and color. They are applied to each other by chiseled surfaces, and their line of junction intersects the figure just below the hips. The inferior block comprises nearly all the drapery. The statue has not been sawn into two portions for the purpose of transportation, but was apparently restored in this manner, and is a unique instance of such treatment; that is to say, unique as regards the extent and importance of the restoration. The two blocks (which are of Parian marble) had been fixed in place at some former time by means of metallic bolts, which have left their mark in rust and fracture. The figure was set up either by carpenters or masons in 1821, and wooden wedges were introduced between the two divisions, giving an exaggerated inclination to the body, and destroying its equilibrium. The plinth, which was originally sloped back at a slight inclination, was made horizontal with the pedestal in which it is incorporated. An inscription temporarily affixed to this pedestal affirms that the wedges remain as placed on the arrival of the statue in France. The chisel was very freely used in adjusting the different fractured or divided pieces of marble, and it is not probable that the mischief done can ever be repaired.

The present intelligent keeper of the Museum of Antiques at the Louvre has prepared and actually exhibited two casts of the Venus: one showing a partially corrected model, by raising the level of the plinth; the other giving a completely corrected attitude. A sensible change in the aspect of the work is the result. The observations made by M. Ravaisson were facilitated by the accidental disintegration of the cement which held the parts together. During the civil war of the Commune at Paris, in 1871, the statue was removed for safety to the cellars of the prefecture of police, where it was again exposed to excessive humidity, in consequence of which the singularly bungling fashion in which it had been worked over was for the first time exposed. No additional damage, however, was done by transportation at this time. As this divinity was adored in crypts, it has very properly twice found its safety there.

A reproduction of the hemicyle, with the figures in their original places, is very much to be desired, to give the effect of the sculpture in the shrine where it was found at Melos: and such a reconstruction may prove to be the first step towards clearing up the mysteries which hang about the statue, of which we have scarcely done more than give the record, supplying the deficiencies of one authority upon the question by quoting from another.

It may be interesting to some readers to be informed of what M. Ravaisson suppressed in his published notice on the Venus of Milo. A fragment of a plinth, bearing part of an inscription, was discovered with the statue, and in all probability belonged to the Venus, and no other. It is certainly not appropriate to the Hermes, which were invariably set upon the ground, and were never signed at the base. The inscription is to the effect that “ Andros, Son of Menides of Antioch, wrought this statue after Maiondro.” As Antioch was not founded until after Alexander’s death, we may place the probable date of the statue near the third century B. C. It may have been executed by “ Andros after Maiondro,” but was clearly no vulgar copy, but apparently a repetition of some lost work of wide celebrity; for also at Capua, Brescia, and Falerone were displayed the divine sisterhood of the Venus of Milo.

The substance of this essay is borrowed, by permission, from unpublished notes furnished by the French archaeologist and critic, M. Grasset d’Orcet. For details regarding the statue we are indebted to the official report on its actual condition, issued in 1871, by M. Felix Ravaisson, keeper of ancient and modern sculpture at the museum of the Louvre.