When Voutier and the Secretary arrived back on Milos the statue had been sold to a Turk and was being loaded on to a ship. Another Contested ArtefactĪs is so often the case, events did not go according to plan. With the necessary permissions and resources cleared, Voutier and the Ambassador’s secretary returned to Milos to acquire the statue for the Ambassador on behalf of the King of France. Immediately they appreciated its significance and set off for Constantinople and the French Ambassador so that they could buy the statue. Two ensigns in the French Navy, Olivier Voutier and Dumont d’Urville, were the first foreigners to see the fragments. Later, he found a hand holding an apple, a fragment of an upper arm, the chignon (the knot of hair at the back of the head), as well as two herms on inscribed bases.Īt this time, Milos was under Ottoman rule, with a heavy French presence in the Aegean. The pieces included a nude upper torso, a draped lower body, and part of the right hip. On 8 April 1820 a farmer uncovered a number of carved fragments while he was removing stones from an ancient wall. Little is known of this man, but he may also have carved a statue of Alexander the Great also in the Louvre, originally from a nearby island. Carved sometime between 130 and 100 BC, it is thought to be the work of a relatively unknown ancient Greek artist Alexandros of Antioch. The statue is generally accepted to be a representation of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty (the goddess’s Roman counterpart is Venus). So although immediately recognisable because of her missing arms and undeniable beauty, the real reason for her ‘fame’ has more to do with museum rivalry than the artistic quality of the statue. After a few twists and turns the statue ended up in Paris, around the same time as the so-called Elgin Marbles were purchased for the British Museum. As with many of the well known ancient artefacts in our museums, there is a very interesting history behind this object histories that are often glossed over in favour of artistic merits. The statue was found by a farmer on a small Greek island in 1820, and is one of the Louvre Museum’s star attractions. The Aphrodite of Milos, better known to us all as the Venus de Milo, is one of the better known of the many ancient Greek sculptures now in museums all around the World.
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