Venus de Milo was meant to make up for a national embarrassment. To save face and better promote Venus de Milo-even at the cost of misinforming the public-the plinth was removed before it was presented to the king. This attribution would have placed the piece in the Classical period (5th through 4th centuries BCE), which was more respected artistically than the Hellenistic period. Sight unseen, early 19th century art historians decided the newly discovered Venus must have been the work of Greek artist Praxiteles, and publicized the work as such. The original plinth was ditched on purpose. quadrangular pillars about three feet high with a carved head at the top.” 8. But “most scholars today believe the sculpture’s arms already were missing when it was found by Voutier and the farmer,” wrote Elizabeth Nix on .Īccording to Curtis, Kentrotas found additional fragments as he dug out the statue, including “a marble hand holding an apple, a piece of a badly mutilated arm, and two herms. One theory has it that the arms were broken off during a scuffle between French and Turkish troops as the statue was removed from Milos another theory suggests that as Venus de Milo was being reassembled, the arms were discarded for having a “rougher” appearance. Alexandros of Antioch is credited with the statue’s creation. ”Voutier gave him a small bribe to dig up the statue instead.” He apparently had to pay Kentrotas a couple more times to unearth all the pieces of the statue. “Its odd shape made it useless as a building block, so the farmer had decided to cover it over,” Curtis wrote. When Voutier got there, he spied the upper half of a statue. When the officer got closer, he saw that Kentrotas was covering up whatever he had seen with dirt. His posture was curious enough that Voutier went to look himself.” noticed that the man had stopped digging for the moment and was staring at something in a niche he had uncovered in the wall. According to Curtis Gregory in his book Disarmed, “Voutier. It almost got reburied.Ī French naval officer named Olivier Voutier and two sailors were indulging in the then-new pursuit of archaeology among the same ruins in which Kentrotas was looking for rocks. On April 8, 1820, a farmer named Yorgos Kentrotas-who was plucking stones from a wall to use on his farm-came across the statue in pieces within the ruins of an ancient city on the island of Milos (formerly known as Melos). The statue is named in part for where it was discovered. Nonetheless, the Roman-inspired name Venus de Milo caught on. However, the Greeks would have called this deity Aphrodite. It’s popularly believed that this Grecian statue depicts the Greek goddess of love and beauty, who was often rendered half-naked. Sadly, no other of the estimated 200 plaster casts in DU’s collection in the 1890s have survived to the present day.‘Venus de Milo.’ / Todd Gipstein/GettyImages Even today, basic drawing instruction at DU includes assignments to draw the surviving cast of the Venus de Milo. While teaching from antique and Renaissance casts fell out of fashion in the early 20 th century, drawing from such works has not entirely disappeared from the art curriculum. It is interesting to note, for example, that New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, at the time of its founding in 1870, was devoted to collecting and exhibiting both contemporary art and plaster casts from the antique. Since the group of accepted antique and Renaissance models was limited to a number of precious and unattainable originals, the plaster cast itself cam to take on a unique significance in art education. The emphasis on drawing from antique sculpture (in North American practice, drawing from casts of ancient Greek and Roman statuary) was the core of most programs. In the earliest days of formal art education in Colorado, the accepted measure of art education remained “classical” training-that is to say, training in the academic European tradition. It is a high quality cast, taken from molds that preserved much of the stone texture of the original marble, including chips and losses. We are fortunate to find this cast in reasonably good condition, despite its age. SAAH pre-conservation students were supervised by a professional art conservator as they removed layers of dirt, grime and water-based paints from the cast’s surface. In the winter of 2009, Venus returned to public view after months of conservation work was complete. This sculpture is one of the least understood objects in the University’s art collections: a plaster cast of the Aphrodite of Melos (also known variously as the Venus de Milo, the Venus of Melos, etc.). exhibited at the Louvre Museum, Paris, France Venus de Milo, Plaster cast of original ca. Venus de Milo, plaster cast of original ca.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |