Paul Carus gave the site of discovery as "the ruins of an ancient theater in the vicinity of Castro, the capital of the island", adding that Bottonis and his son "came accidentally across a small cave, carefully covered with a heavy slab and concealed, which contained a fine marble statue in two pieces, together with several other marble fragments. Įlsewhere, the discoverers are identified as the Greeks Yorgos Bottonis and his son Antonio. This ancient city is the current village of Trypiti, on the island of Milos (also called Melos, or Milo) in the Aegean, which was then a part of the Ottoman Empire. It is generally asserted that the Venus de Milo was discovered on 8 April 1820 by a Greek farmer named Yorgos Kentrotas, inside a buried niche within the ancient city ruins of Milos. Site of the discovery of the Venus de Milo Without arms, it is unclear what the statue originally looked like, but textile archeologist Elizabeth Wayland Barber notes that the posture of Venus de Milo suggests that she may have been hand spinning. There is a filled hole below her right breast that originally contained a metal tenon that would have supported the separately carved right arm. The statue originally would have had two arms, two feet, both earlobes intact and a plinth. The Venus de Milo is a 204 cm (6 ft 8 in) tall Parian marble statue of a Greek goddess, most likely Aphrodite, depicted half-clothed with a bare torso. The statue is missing both arms, with part of one arm, as well as the original plinth, being lost after the statue's rediscovery. Made of Parian marble, the statue is larger than life size, standing 204 cm (6 ft 8 in) high. The work was originally attributed to the 4th century BC Athenian sculptor Praxiteles, but, based upon an inscription on its plinth, it is now widely agreed that the statue was created later, and instead is the work of Alexandros of Antioch. Some scholars theorize that the statue actually represents the sea-goddess Amphitrite, who was venerated on the island in which the statue was found. The sculpture is sometimes called the Aphrodite de Milos, due to the imprecision of naming the Greek sculpture after a Roman deity (Venus). The Venus de Milo is believed to depict Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, whose Roman counterpart was Venus. It is one of the most famous works of ancient Greek sculpture, having been prominently displayed at the Louvre Museum since shortly after the statue was rediscovered on the island of Milos, Greece, in 1820. The Venus de Milo ( / d ə ˈ m aɪ l oʊ, d ə ˈ m iː l oʊ/ də MY-loh, də MEE-loh Ancient Greek: Ἀφροδίτη τῆς Μήλου, romanized: Aphrodítē tēs Mḗlou) is an ancient Greek sculpture that was created during the Hellenistic period, sometime between 150 and 125 BC. Who cares what her arms were doing? It is their absence that makes the Venus de Milo a modern enigma.For other uses, see Venus de Milo (disambiguation). The accidents of archeology have turned this ancient statue into a masterpiece of the uncanny. After the first world war, the dadaists and surrealists chopped up images of statues in such works as Max Ernst’s collage novel The Hundred Headless Woman. Greek myths became images of the psyche in Sigmund Freud’s interpretations of dreams. The classical world was imagined as an eerie sepulchre of beauty in Arnold Bocklin’s painting The Isle of the Dead. The armless Venus de Milo entered European culture in the 19th century just as artists and writers were rejecting the perfect and timeless. Who wants perfection? Who worships straight-lined classical reason? It was admired two hundred years ago as an image of the absolute rational clarity of Greek civilisation and the perfect harmony of divine beauty. That boring masterpiece has both its arms and is perfect in every way. In the 18th century, aristocrats and artists took their Grand Tours to Rome to revere the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican Museum. This statue embodies – literally - the modern world’s ambivalence towards classical beauty. Dali saw the armless Greek goddess as a ready-made surrealist object straight out of a dream. In 1936, Salvador Dali made a copy of the Venus de Milo with drawers inserted in it, so it could be used as a piece of furniture. That sense of enigmatic incompleteness has transformed an ancient work of art into a modern one. She is perfect but imperfect, beautiful but broken – the body as a ruin. Her lack of arms makes her strange and dreamlike. The Venus de Milo is an accidental surrealist masterpiece. Why, two centuries after its discovery, does this sculpture still fascinate? The interesting question is why we want to talk about the arms at all. Accidental surrealist masterpiece: the Venus de Milo at the Louvre, Paris.
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