Venus de Milo (Aphrodite of Melos)
Unknown, sometimes identified as Alexandros of Antioch · c. 150-125 BC
Aphrodite stands with her weight on the right leg, the left knee pushed forward, a heavy mantle slipping from her hips and caught, improbably, on the raised thigh. The upper body is bare. The missing arms have fed two centuries of speculation: she may have held an apple, the prize of the judgement of Paris and a pun on the name of her island, Melos; she may have propped a shield of Ares on her knee and looked at her reflection in it; she may simply have gathered the falling drapery. The face is deliberately remote, the gaze directed past the viewer, and that reticence is part of the effect.
Look closely at the join running around the hips. The statue was assembled from two principal blocks of Parian marble, with separate pieces for the left arm and foot, and the sculptor hid the seam inside the deepest fold of the mantle. The style is knowingly retrospective: the small breasts, the calm oval head and the classical profile quote sculpture of the fourth century BC, while the twisting spiral of the pose and the sensuous contrast of polished flesh against rough cloth are pure Hellenistic invention. Traces of metal attachments show she once wore a bracelet, earrings and a headband.
A farmer named Yorgos Kentrotas uncovered her in 1820 in a walled niche near the ancient theatre of Melos. The French naval officer Olivier Voutier saw the find, and the Marquis de Rivière, ambassador to the Ottoman court, bought the statue and presented it to Louis XVIII in 1821. France had just been obliged to return the Medici Venus to Italy, and the new arrival was promoted hard as a superior replacement, a campaign that turned a provincial Greek statue into one of the most reproduced images in the world.
Did You Know? An inscribed plinth found with her named a sculptor from Antioch on the Meander, which would date her to around 100 BC; the block vanished in Paris soon after arrival and only a drawing of it survives.
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