Gregory Curtis (28 page)

That last conclusion aggravated Hasse, a fellow at the anatomical institute in Breslau. In his paper on the Venus de Milo, published in 1882, he had praised the statue’s naturalism. Now he decided that Henke’s paper was simply wrong, because he didn’t believe that an asymmetrical face was at all abnormal.

To test his assumption, Hasse created a square grid and photographed the face of the statue and the faces of a number of
friends behind it. Measuring by the grid, he could see that every face was asymmetrical. The more Hasse studied the grids, the more asymmetries he found. Among the most important was that in every case—including the statue—the left eye was closer to the center of the face than the right eye, and a line connecting the two pupils was not horizontal.

Hasse suspected that the asymmetry of the pupil line in the statue and in people compensated for the tilt of the pelvis. He had long been aware of a slight bow in most people’s spinal cords that shifts the head to one side or the other. In 1888 Hasse and a colleague published a study of the pelvises of women showing that they had the same asymmetrical tilt of the hips as the Venus de Milo. In 1893 he published a study of the backbones of 5, 141 men, which found that only one third of the backbones were completely straight. All these asymmetries had the effect of canceling themselves out so that the line between the eyes was parallel to the horizon. With this research Hasse had disproved the centuries-old prevailing wisdom of both anatomists and artists that human features were symmetrical. Asymmetry was the norm; symmetry was abnormal.

Hasse’s work was the beginning of what has become a fertile and fascinating branch of research in
psychology, one that concentrates in particular on how people display emotions. As a simple example, cover one side of a face in a photograph, then the other. The two sides will often appear to show different emotions.
Paul Erkman, author of
Emotion in the Human Face
and
Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage
, is one well-known researcher in this area. Research methodology has progressed far beyond photographing the face of the Venus de Milo behind a grid, but that is where it began. A meticulous examination of the statue, followed by a dispute over the results, led to a wholly unexpected and unexplored path toward comprehending the human psyche. It’s unusual for a work of art to inspire a new field of scientific inquiry, but the Venus de Milo did.

The statue has inspired many artists who, like the scientists,
use it for their own purposes. It’s not so much the anatomical detail that they respond to but something true—true in the deepest sense—in the form of the sculpture that makes the accurate anatomy matter. Cézanne sketched the Venus in the Louvre and used her pose in his paintings of bathers. Magritte painted a small replica, making the head white, the body the color of flesh, the nipples pink, the drapery deep blue, and the base black. These colors, he said, “restore the Venus to an unexpected life.” Dalí sculpted and painted her in a variety of ways. Seeing that her neck is quite long, he created a giraffe Venus with an elongated neck as tall as her body. He also sculpted a Venus with drawers coming out of her breasts, stomach, and left knee. A photograph of the statue wedged into Ravaisson’s oak crate could have been his inspiration here. More recently,
Jim Dine obsessively returns to the statue in paintings and sculptures. Three of these, cast as massive bronzes, stand on the Avenue of the Americas in midtown New York.
Clive Barker has shown her wrapped in rope, locked in chains, and impishly, with her tongue stuck in her cheek. These are only a handful of the many works of art whose inspiration began with the Venus de Milo. All this shows that the truth within her can take many forms. It can even put its tongue in its cheek and pretend it’s only kidding.

Artists are seekers after truth, but the Venus de Milo also inspires those who seek something else: increased sales. Advertisers use the statue either to associate its beauty and truth with their product or to get a laugh. In 1996 a Mercedes ad showed a photograph of the statue across the page from their new Class E sedan. None of the type in the ad referred to the statue. Its presence spoke for itself. Leaving aside the appeal to classic beauty, a mid-eighties ad for the French retailer Darty has the statue saying, “When I see Darty prices, it makes my arms fall”; that is, she is dumbfounded.

And then there are the many cartoons and parodies in which low culture gives a gleeful raspberry to the high. A Greek sculptor in his workshop with the Venus de Milo complains to a friend, “I just can’t do arms.” As
Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator
rides past her, she suddenly raises a right arm in salute. In a publicity still from 1957,
Jayne Mansfield in a tight sweater and tight skirt stands next to her at the Louvre. The poster for
Robert Altman’s
Nashville
shows the Venus in a cowboy hat and dark glasses.

But the statue’s success as a cultural icon has worked against it among scholars and critics. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, writers on the statue were uniformly admiring. The rhapsodies of romantic poets in her praise became almost a cliché. Back then it was the artists and the intelligentsia who were leading the masses toward appreciating the statue. Today the masses don’t need to be convinced, while the intelligentsia have lost interest. Although there are scholars who still see the statue as a great work of art, for an ambitious critic who wants to demonstrate his or her discernment, there is no point at all in simply agreeing with the popular taste. We’ve seen how
Geoffrey Grigson, an eminent British scholar, says he is “repelled” by the statue.
R. R. R. Smith, a professor of classical archeology and art at Oxford, calls her “matronly,” “heavy,” “blank,” and “solemn.” In 1975 Martin Robertson wrote in his
A History of Greek Art
that the statue’s “mild merits hardly justify the figure’s extraordinary reputation, which started by propaganda has become perpetuated by habit.”

These dour opinions can only be in reaction to the statue’s fame, since the descriptions of other Greek statues, even inferior ones, use noticeably milder language. In a sense these opinions don’t matter, since scholarly tastes will change, as they have in the past, while the statue will remain the same. These negative opinions are occasionally based on the presumed superiority of statues of Aphrodite that no longer exist. For instance, R. R. R. Smith says that, “placed beside the original of the Crouching Aphrodite, [the Venus de Milo] would probably have seemed rather dull.” But since neither he nor anyone else in the past two thousand years has seen the original of the Crouching Aphrodite, how could he possibly know?

Feminist art historians tend to look askance at the Venus de Milo as well. For the past thirty years they have usually been concerned with art since the
Renaissance. Now they are beginning
to look at the classical world. Feminist interpretations of classical art and life have caused a conservative backlash in some classics departments. The conservatives are generally the better writers, but the books and articles on both sides—the lethal salvos in this arcane fight—make entertaining reading once you know a little about the combatants and become inured to the jargon.

However, the feminist approach strikes me as potentially fruitful. Scholarship about the statue is in a rut.
Adolf Furtwängler wrote the last original and convincing interpretation using all the evidence—and that was in 1893!

The problem is that there is so little new information and so
little new interpretation. If there is a spectacular archeological find—another statue signed by Alexandros, let’s say—that would certainly tell us more about the Venus de Milo. Unfortunately, such a lucky event is unlikely. That leaves new interpretation as the only road to discovery, and looking at the statue with new eyes is exactly what the feminists are trying to do. As
Shelby Brown wrote in an essay titled “ ‘Ways of Seeing’: Women in Antiquity,” “Authors writing on nude classical sculptures, for example, have tended to ignore completely the gender relations implied by the body language, or to point out their titillating aspects without considering in any depth the social construction of modesty for women and voyeurism for men.” Feminist critics are uneasy with the Venus de Milo, the best-known sculpted image of a woman in our culture, because a man created it to be displayed only to other men in a gymnasium. “What does that tell us?” is the question they seek to answer, and answering it adequately will require seeing the statue in ways past scholars never attempted or even imagined. A feminist critic who was backed by solid scholarship and an expert eye and had a mind supple enough to discern whether there is a pattern behind all the subtleties and contradictions could be the next Furtwängler.

W
HATEVER
opinions modern scholars may have, a visit to the Louvre is enough to show that the Venus de Milo is in no danger of losing its place in the public consciousness. It isn’t just the sheer number of people in the crowds that arrive in her alcove, although that is impressive enough. Most visitors listen to their guide, look at the statue quizzically, pose for a picture in front of her, and then move on. They have had the experience they wanted. But a significant minority linger, walk slowly around the statue, look at it from each angle, and try to extract everything from the moment that they can. They get the experience they want, too. It’s rare to see someone go away disappointed. People accept that the statue is great art, that it has nobility and
truth that are unaffected whether she has drawers coming out of her breasts or wears a cowboy hat and shades.