There are multiple theories about the Venus de Milo, the ancient Greek statue famous for its immaculate beauty and lack of arms. Many suggestions about how those missing limbs were once positioned and what Venus was doing with them have been advanced since this elegant antiquity was discovered in 1820 on the Aegean island of Milos.
Was she holding a spear? Was she a prostitute? Or looking in a handheld mirror? The interesting question is why we want to talk about the arms at all. Why, two centuries after its discovery, does this sculpture still fascinate?
This statue embodies – literally - the modern world’s ambivalence towards classical beauty. In the 18th century, aristocrats and artists took their Grand Tours to Rome to revere the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican Museum. That boring masterpiece has both its arms and is perfect in every way. 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. All that bores us stiff nowadays. Who wants perfection? Who worships straight-lined classical reason?
The accidents of archeology have turned this ancient statue into a masterpiece of the uncanny. Who cares what her arms were doing? It is their absence that makes the Venus de Milo a modern enigma.
May 2014 | Milos, Greece
