Gregory Curtis (17 page)

In 1874, when he began publishing his stories on the Venus
de Milo in
Le Temps
, Aicard was twenty-six. He was quite visible on the Paris literary scene, where he reveled in his role as the conquering provincial. He was handsome, wore his dark hair and beard long, and was blessed with a seductive, theatrical voice with which he entranced the audiences who crowded into his readings.

He had just published
Poèmes de Provence
, a series of lyric poems about the life and countryside of his native region. The book became a spectacular success. For the rest of his life, his childhood in Provence continued to inspire his many poems, plays, essays, and novels. Eventually he was admitted into the
Académie Française. He wrote rapidly while lying in bed and refused to rewrite. When friends urged him to use more care, he said, “It’s useless. I can’t. You have to take me as I am.”

Aicard expanded his articles in
Le Temps
, added some new information uncovered after they had appeared, and quickly published the result as a book called
The Venus de Milo: Investigations of the History of the Discovery according to Unpublished Documents
. Being by Aicard, it is sloppy, shallow, and a long way from presenting a rational argument. He often refers to both arms being intact, although his sources mention only the left arm. But the book is also passionate and readable. Aicard gives a stirring account of the supposed battle on the shore. That, in addition to his glee in revealing what he believes is a long-hidden secret, has given his book an influence out of proportion to its merit.

Aicard’s
Venus de Milo
reproduces a number of original documents concerning the statue that are difficult to find elsewhere. For that scholars owe him some thanks. Otherwise, he attempts to prove that the fight occurred and that the arms of the statue were lost by quoting Matterer’s written recollections; by a careful parsing of d’Urville’s paper; by reading between the lines of Marcellus and Clarac; and by the later claims of Brest, Brest’s son,
Yorgos’s son, and Yorgos’s nephew, all as quoted in a letter from a former French ambassador to Greece. Unfortunately for Aicard, each of these arguments is easily refuted.

Aicard accepts Matterer’s story of the fight as true in every
detail. But when Matterer wrote his
Notes nécrologiques
about d’Urville in 1842, he never mentioned either an intact arm or any fight on the shore. Why not? Matterer says he did not commit this “imprudence” because “I would have incurred the wrath of the great men of Paris, especially that of the minister of the navy. Undoubtedly, this minister would not have printed my notice and might have even forced me to retire, for I was still in service as a ship’s captain.” Matterer is trapped by his 1842 reminiscence, and this clear prevarication was nothing more than his way out.

Neither d’Urville nor Marcellus nor Clarac mentions any fight in his account of the events. To Aicard that doesn’t mean there was no fight; on the contrary, it is absolute proof that they are all complicit in the cover-up Marcellus began in order to make his diplomacy more impressive. Aicard doesn’t propose to tell us what Marcellus could have said or done to keep all fifty sailors on the winning side of a fight from ever bragging about it even years later.

After his newspaper articles appeared, Aicard received a letter from
Jules Ferry, formerly France’s ambassador to Greece. Aicard includes this letter in his book. As ambassador Ferry had visited
Melos in 1873. There he met Louis Brest’s son, who, like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, was France’s viceconsul on the island. In the fifty years since the affair, local legend had greatly amplified Brest’s role. Bitter because he thought the French government had neglected him and diminished his role in the discovery of the famous statue, he himself was the source of his growing local reputation. Just a few years after the discovery, he began telling stories about his role to anyone who would listen. Supposedly, he had purchased the statue long before any of the French ships arrived; when he bought it, the statue had its left arm; there was a fight on the shore. Brest, old and fat, would get a laugh by posing as the statue, with his left arm raised in the air.

The ambassador also met the son and the nephew of the farmer Yorgos. They both claimed to have been present at the
discovery, and they too insisted that the left arm was intact. It extended straight out to the left and held an apple in its palm, exactly the pose that Matterer describes in his final recollections. They had seen the fight on the shore as well.

Unfortunately, Brest seems to have forgotten the letters he himself wrote at the time of the discovery. For instance, he wrote to
Pierre David, the consul in Smyrna, “She is a little mutilated; the arms are broken.” And d’Urville’s paper, which does say that there is a hand holding an apple, also says that the arms “have been mutilated, one and the other, and are presently detached from the body.”

A
ICARD’S
case collapsed from its own weight, but the popularity of his book brought the proofs that would clinch the case against him to the surface. The most important person to emerge from obscurity was
Olivier Voutier, the dashing Bonapartist and revolutionary soldier in Greece who had been digging nearby when Yorgos first uncovered the statue. When Aicard’s book appeared, Voutier was seventy-eight years old and living in his château on the Côte d’Azur. (This beautiful property later belonged to
Edith Wharton.) After fighting for Greek independence and winning a hero’s medals, Voutier found his later years something of a disappointment. Like Forbin and Ravaisson, he had been a friend of Madame Récamier’s, and he had written her long, intense letters about the fighting in Greece. He had known Napoleon III when they were both young men, and Voutier expected to be rewarded for his lifelong Bonapartism with an important position in the government or military. But the new emperor inexplicably shunned his old friend. Wounded, Voutier retired to his château, married, and quietly raised two daughters.

In 1860, prompted by having come across one of Marcellus’s books, Voutier wrote him a long letter expressing fond memories
of the count and their voyage around the Levant on the
Estafette
with the Venus de Milo on board. Voutier also explained for the first time his role in the discovery. He even told Marcellus about the drawings he had made on the spot and added that, despite the vicissitudes of the years, he still had them in his possession.

Marcellus, who had married the comte de Forbin’s beautiful younger daughter, Valentine, had had a distinguished career as a diplomat. He had left government service in 1830 when Charles X was overthrown and retired to his wife’s estate. Presumably Valentine’s miserly grandmother had either died or loosened her grip on the family fortune. Marcellus occupied himself by writing a series of popular memoirs about his years as an ambassador in the Levant and in
England. He responded to Voutier with a joyful letter. He reminisced happily about their voyage together. He even remembered the comic sacrifice of the chicken when they were hungry and their ship was becalmed near the mouth of the Nile.

Marcellus died in 1865. The only other person who knew of this correspondence was his widow, Valentine. When Aicard’s book appeared in 1874, she was insulted because it imputed lies and an unattractive careerism to her husband. She wrote Voutier asking him to tell Ravaisson all he knew about the discovery of the statue. Voutier, responding to the request of his friend’s widow, but perhaps also aware that here was his final chance to secure at least a small place in history, at last broke his silence about his role in the discovery. He published a short pamphlet that told the story of finding the statue with Yorgos and making drawings at the site. Then he sent tracings of the drawings to Ravaisson. They show both halves of the statue and the two herms, each one standing on an inscribed base. The base of the herm with the young man’s head is inscribed with the name of the sculptor from Antioch. The base of the bearded herm also has an inscription, which had by now been completely lost. These two inscriptions proved the validity of Voutier’s drawings,
since he could not have known about them except by seeing them with the herms when the statue was discovered.

The most important detail in the drawing is this: At the time of the discovery the statue had no arms. It looked just as it does today.

Now, just months after the 1874 publication of Aicard’s book, Ravaisson had proof that its revelations were false. But the ethereal philosopher had spent all his life avoiding conflict, and he avoided it once again. Eventually, he did write a paper in which he published Voutier’s drawings. And he used them to attack Aicard’s book directly. But that was eighteen years later, in 1892.

This long delay had its consequences. Many people read Aicard’s book with its fight on the shore, but only diligent scholars read Ravaisson’s refutation so many years later. Meanwhile, the story about the fight between French sailors and Turkish marines rallied by the evil priest Oconomos became an established “fact,” and, sadly, it has remained part of the lore about the Venus de Milo ever since. Here is
Matthew Kangas writing in the November–December 1990 issue of
Sculpture:
“It seems clear that the statue was found in two parts in a cave on the Greek island of Melos and then reassembled, and that later, during a battle between French consular officials and Turkish agents trying to prevent its export, the arms were broken off.”

In 2001, the generally savvy
Mary Beard and
John Henderson wrote in their
Classical Art from Greece to Rome
that after “a scuffle on the beach between some Turkish and French soldiers (who were both claiming the prize), she fell into the hands of the French.”

The fight on the beach is an article of faith among certain academics whose political beliefs almost demand that a fight have taken place. Here is
Olga Augustinos, author of
French Odysseys: Greece in French Travel Literature from the Renaissance to the Romantic Era
(1994): “Years later, Marcellus’s account of his feat was contradicted by eyewitnesses, some of whom maintained
that when the statue changed hands, force was used and there was an armed confrontation between the Greeks and the crew of the
Estafette
, who won in the end.” She admits that the “evidence surrounding this episode is conflicting.” Nevertheless, she concludes:

She is wrong about more than just the fight, since the alleged battle was against Turks, not Greeks, and the Turks certainly had no respect for Greek antiquities. The Europeans saw themselves, often correctly, as protecting the Greek heritage from the hostile Turks.

Augustinos has a light touch, however, compared to
Caroline Arscott and
Katie Scott, both of the
Courtauld Institute in London, who write in
Manifestations of Venus: Art and Sexuality
(2000):

“Something to say about the origins of Western culture”? What, exactly? Here again, these authors get more wrong than the fight on the shore, and they are guilty of the cultural stereotyping they pretend to oppose. For instance, the Turkish military of 1820 was not poorly equipped. On the contrary, it controlled a vast empire, including all of southeastern Europe, that once stretched from the Caspian Sea almost to Budapest. For these authors the fight simply must have happened. If there was no fight, the facts of the discovery and acquisition would not support their political theories. Such are the results of Ravaisson’s delay in closing Pandora’s box.

R
AVAISSON’S
refutation of Aicard in 1892, although arriving too late to be effective, was at least convincing. He trotted out Voutier’s sketches, explaining how he obtained them so as to establish their authenticity, and rested his case. Then Ravaisson spent the remainder of his essay describing and defending his reconstruction of the statue. Here, too, his long delay—the best excuse is that these were to be his final words on the Venus de Milo after twenty years of study—proved self-defeating. He lived so much in his own mind that he had not noticed the new generation of archeologists who had come of age. They were different. They knew more than their counterparts in the past, and they played rough.

Ravaisson, like Quatremère de Quincy, had always thought that the Venus de Milo had been paired with a statue of Mars. In his paper of 1871, where he began by describing his discovery of the two wooden wedges and the faulty restoration at the Louvre,
he even identified the second figure as being like the
Borghese Mars, a sculpture showing a nude Mars with a helmet, a shield on his left arm, and a short sword in his right hand.

Ravaisson never wavered from his belief that these two statues belonged together, although he eventually came to believe that the Borghese statue was not Mars but Theseus, the legendary king of Athens who as a young man had killed the Minotaur on Crete. The clue was a band on the statue’s right ankle, a reminder of the time when Theseus was taken to Crete as a slave in chains.