RECENT THEORIES.
THE statue discovered on the island of Milo acquired a fame beyond the greatest expectations, and the intense interest taken in it frequently gave rise to bitter discussions about its history and the causes of its mutilation. Thus it happened that the authorities of the Louvre, or even the French government itself, were held responsible for the sad state of desolation in which it now appears.
Accusations were made that this venerable piece of classic art had been treated with inexcusable neglect, that important inscriptions belonging to it had been lost, and the claim was even made that the statue was whole at the time it was found. The dissatisfied parties interpreted M. Dumont d’Urville’s report in the sense that he had seen the statue whole, quoting from his description: “It represented a nude woman whose left hand was raised and held an apple and the right supported a garment draped in easy folds and falling carelessly from her loins to her feet.” This in their opinion meant that M. d’Urville had seen the statue complete in this posture when he bought it. The sentence which runs, “Both hands have been mutilated and are actually detached from the body,” according to this contention is to be interpreted that this must have happened before the French party delivered the statue to the Louvre, probably at the time when the French marines forced its transfer from the Turkish brig to the French warship “Estafette.”
The points raised in this discussion overlook some significant facts which if duly considered dispose of the claim that the statue was whole and unmutilated when discovered and sold to M. Dumont d’Urville. Viscount Marcellus enumerates the objects discovered in the cave and mentions fragments of the statue found in the field nearby. Could he, an eye witness, have believed that it was whole and unmutilated when he assumes that a number of separate fragments belonged to it?
It is not impossible that the quarrel between the French marines and the Turks was a regular fight; that they came to blows, but scarcely to shots. If there had been any fatalities we would have heard of it in the first report of the acquisition of the statue; but no serious wounds in the struggle are mentioned even in the later report, although in it we learn of a fight on the beach about the possession of the statue, and this later became humorously exaggerated into a battle involving drawn cutlases and a bleeding ear.
The discussion was renewed in 1912 by M. Alcard who laid much emphasis upon the testimony of Lieutenant Matterer, a comrade of M. Dumont d’Urville. He is claimed to have felt such disgust about the endless disputes on the original form of the Venus of Milo that he wished to put an end to them. He says: “When I saw the statue in the hut of Yorgos Bottonis on whose field it was found, the left arm was attached to the bust and held an apple over her head.”
This positive statement stands in plain contradiction to the older records and it seems that the imagination of the valiant naval officer played his memory a trick after the lapse of nearly half a century. Perhaps it is impossible to evolve the exact truth definitely, but it seems to me that we must not estimate these later testimonies too highly, for it would be more difficult then to explain the actual condition of the statue and its agreement with the older descriptions, than now to account for these later depositions of a few excitable and imaginative men who feel that they have something of great importance to declare. Moreover, the most important witness, Lieutenant Matterer, is characterized in these accounts as “an officer of great merit but no literary cultivation,” which does not seem to make his opinion especially reliable.
The Sunday Record-Herald of Chicago (Nov. 24, 1912) contains a summary of this later phase of the discussion as to the condition of the Venus of Milo from which we quote a few passages that in spite of the sensational character of the account may be of interest. The American reporter, relying on his French sources, says:
“The great Thiers began his start in journalism by a study of this Venus and the riddle of her arms. So when he became president of the French republic he ordered the ambassador to Greece, Jules Ferry, to make a trip to Melos and pick up local tradition. Ferry did better. He found the son and nephew still alive, Antonio and Yorgos Jr. ‘They have grown to be beautiful old men—white-bearded, ruddy, robust and bright-eyed,’ reported Ferry. ‘Examined separately before the French vice-consul at Castro they declared steadily, with minute details and explanatory gestures and poses, that Venus, when they found her, was standing upright on her pedestal, her right arm sustaining her draperies and her left arm raised and extended, its hand holding an apple.’”
I assume that the old Greek peasants spoke Greek, and so M. Ferry probably understood their meaning mainly from their “explanatory gestures and poses” which might as well have expressed their idea of the original attitude of the statue as the way in which they actually saw it.