“Bust and front have scarcely suffered from the ravages of time. They keep the velvety skin of a master of the great Greek period, who, after polishing, once more skimmed the chisel over the perfect work. But here and there are slight lesions, due, probably, to careless pickstrokes in digging her up. The shoulders have been much damaged, traces of cords indicate that she was dragged along the shore toward the Turkish brig, and in that fatal passage the shoulders and haunches were scraped and worn, several finger breadths being taken off the former.”
The fertile imagination of the account changes the Greek brig “Galaxidion” into a Turkish man-of-war so as to impress the reader that there is a diplomatic secret to be hidden which might involve the French authorities into a war with Turkey. The cause, being about the goddess of love, would be quite romantic but a war is serious enough to make the authorities wish to avoid it and prefer to cast a shadow of mystery over the whole affair.
We shall see later that the mutilations of the statue need not have originated from careless handling on the part of the French marines when they took possession of the statue.
Here is another passage which describes the nature of the injuries of the Venus statue without, however, being proof of the battle of the beach:
“The shoulder has been broken, not merely scraped and worn, by dragging. And the author of another report, M. Lange, chief restorer of the Royal Museum in 1820, specialist of vast experience and a workman to boot, notes certain exfoliations or scrapings of the left arm fragments ‘running straight up on to the shoulder of the statue, and found also on the back of the hand fragment, which show that these different parts formed one with the shoulder; and these straight scratches could only have been made, all following the same direction, when the left arm was entire!’”
This quotation is made to prove that the arm was still connected with the statue before it was scraped along the ground, but may not this scraping have taken place before it was hidden in the cave?
The Louvre’s acquisition of the Venus of Milo proved in some respects a misfortune to the Count de Clarac. Charles Lenormant, the archeologist, in a contribution to the Correspondant in 1854 mercilessly attacked the director of the Louvre and his staff, saying (as reported in the Record-Herald):
“I have always believed that from the beginning to better accredit a production which is its own best proofs, they designedly caused to disappear accessories which might derange the idea that they had just conquered a chef-d’oeuvre of the grand epoch of Greek art. Thus, besides the arms, they suppressed the debris of an inscription.”
Can we entertain the suspicion that the authorities of the Louvre purposely destroyed the inscription assumed to have been found with the debris of the Venus of Milo and that they suppressed facts or the knowledge of facts which might bear testimony against their cherished theories as to the provenience of their favorite piece of art? Scarcely! The inscription, as we have seen, was doubtless lost because nobody cared for it, for there was no evidence that it belonged to the statue.