Restorations
Many attempts have been made to restore the statue of the Venus of Milo, and we here reproduce a number of them, but none of them have proved successful. It almost seems, as the German poet Heinrich Heine somewhere says, that the Venus of Milo in her helpless condition with her arms broken off appeals more to our sympathy than in her original condition of glory when she received the homage of faithful worshipers, and it is true the very mutilated form is extremely attractive in its present dilapidated state. Broken by fanatics of a hostile faith, she represents in dignity and beauty the natural charm of Greek religion at its best. The hordes of bigoted monks vented their hatred with especial wrath against the goddess of love and also against her son, Eros, as may be seen from a figure of this god represented in his daintiest youthfulness. Here too the marks of the clubs of a furious mob are visible, betraying the same spirit as in the treatment of the Venus of Milo. It is the fanaticism of ascetic frenzy in the bitterness of its wrath against nature in general and love in particular that showed itself in these iconoclastic demonstrations.
We regret now the destruction of the Greek idols as a barbaric warfare waged upon art. We have begun to sympathize with the vanquished gods, and archeologists are trying to restore what early Christianity ruthlessly destroyed or mutilated.
Those restorers of the Venus of Milo who reject the genuineness of the right hand holding an apple enjoy the greatest liberty in their work of reconstruction, and we find some of them representing our Venus as holding a shield on her knee and writing upon it. Others assume that her right hand holds a mirror, while still others who claim that there is no necessity of interpreting the statue to be a Venus, believe her to be a Victory or Niké, and put wreaths in her hands.
Hasse and Henke have treated the problem of restoration from the standpoint of anatomy, and plausibly claim that the left hand should be raised higher than other restorers have proposed.
The restoration of Furtwängler, according to which the goddess rests her left arm on a column and holds an apple in her hand, has for a long time been considered the most probable, and yet even this can scarcely be regarded as satisfactory.
Mr. Geskel Saloman, a Swedish archeologist, also places a column at her left side and uses it for her elbow to rest on. In consideration of some ancient descriptions of a dramatic ceremony performed at Corinth he places a dove on her right hand. The idea is that having received the apple as the prize of beauty she sends out the dove to her worshipers to announce her triumph and inform them that they may celebrate the victory.
Veit Valentin attempts to construct his restoration out of the data furnished by the marble itself and seems to come nearest to the truth. He assumes that the goddess, when in the act of undressing for a bath, finds herself surprised by an intruder. There is no fear or alarm in her attitude, but she raises her hand in protest with a self-poised assurance and grasps with her right hand the falling garment which she attempts to support by a hurried motion of her left knee. We regret that we have not seen either a picture or a statue of this restoration, but we are deeply impressed that this idea is most probably correct.
The latest restoration comes from Francisca Paloma Del Mar (Frank Paloma) who places a child on the left arm of the goddess, and this conception is defended in a special pamphlet by Alexander Del Mar.6
Mr. Del Mar brings out the idea that the reverence in which the great mother goddess was held among the pagans was not substantially different in piety from Christian Madonna worship, and this view is brought out in the painting by the artist
Frank Paloma here reproduced. Mr. Del Mar thinks that the pagan goddess served the inhabitants of Melos as a Christian Virgin. He says:
“What more natural than for the pious islanders of Melos, terrified by the harsh edicts of Theodosius, to simply burn the pedestal and inscription belonging to their pagan goddess, and continue to worship under another name the same embodiment of that holy sentiment of love and maternity which they had hitherto been accustomed to adore.”
Mr. Del Mar relies on the testimony of Count Marcellus who finally concluded the bargain in the name of the French government and quotes him as saying in his Souvenirs de l’Orient, I, 255: “It can be demonstrated that the statue represented the Panagia or Holy Virgin of the little Greek chapel whose ruins I saw at Milo.”
It seems to us that the statue cannot have carried a child on her left arm because the marble would show more trace of pressure where the mother must have touched the babe, even when we make allowance for a polishing in the restored portions; and we would suggest further that the arm carrying the child would be held farther down. When a mother carries a child, her upper and lower arms are naturally at right angles and the position of having them at a very acute angle at the elbow appears quite artificial.
The haloes placed upon the heads of mother and child and the apple of empire in the infant’s hand are attributes belonging to the Christian era and so constitute other objections to Mr. Del Mar’s restoration. The halo is of late pagan origin, and in the form of rays it was first used to characterize gods of light, as for instance Helios and Selene. The round form of the nimbus is later still and seems to have arisen with the development of the art of painting. The apple of empire was not used in the days of antiquity but appears frequently in Constantinople and in early Christian symbolism.
Without entering into details we leave it to the taste of the reader whether he would select any of these restorations as a possible solution of the problem: we prefer to admire the statue as it appears now; for after all the broken figure still remains dearer to us in its wonderful and appealing beauty than any of the restorations. We ourselves believe that modern man will come to the conclusion that in this image in its present shape we have a noble martyr of ancient paganism. Even the original statue itself in all its perfection, if it could be restored to us as it came fresh from the artist’s workshop, could not replace the torso as we know it now.
This is the reason why we do not take a great interest in the various restorations of the Venus of Milo, and therefore are not inclined to undertake a close study of them or to enter into an elaborate recapitulation of these otherwise quite laudable attempts. We can only say that none of the restorations here discussed seems to solve the problem. Nevertheless we do not believe the problem to be beyond the possibility of solution, and we will state briefly what in our opinion the facts suggest.
We believe that among all the propositions made by restorers the simplest one, that of Veit Valentin, alone deserves our interest.
If we consider the dominating motive of the statue we must grant that it neither belongs to the very earliest times in which Venus was fully dressed, nor to the latest in which nudity, intensified in its suggestiveness by prudery, had nearly become the most characteristic feature of the deity of love. It takes its place in the midst of Greek art development when the first attempt was made to show the human form, and this is done in such a way as not to go to the extreme of a complete denudation but only suggests it and, as it were, with a protest on the part of the goddess. For the attitude of the statue plainly indicates that the goddess endeavors to retard the falling garment so as to give the right arm a moment’s time to grasp it and to hold it up. It is more than merely probable that the left arm was raised toward an unexpected intruder in warning not to approach. There is no fear in the expression of the face, no fright, no anticipation of danger. The whole attitude makes us suspect that the missing left hand was raised with a forbidding gesture, expressing the command, Ne prorsum! Ne plus ultra! Noli me tangere!