Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
VENUS DE MILO AND HER STRANGE ALLURE
We had spent a whole morning in
the few rooms of the Louvre that display French paintings of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. David, Gericault, Gros, Delacroix, Ingres. We
were determined not to be the sort of tourists who rush from room to room,
trying to “do” the whole of the Louvre in one day and never taking their eyes
from their viewfinders. You cannot survey satisfactorily the whole of this vast
museum in months, let alone in one day, so our idea was to look at a few things
closely rather than turning the Louvre into a blur of impressions.
But after lunch in the museum’s
café, we decided we would look at two tourist magnets – the Mona Lisa and the
Venus de Milo.
Pardon me if I do not linger on
how underwhelmed I have always been by the Italian portrait. Granted, you can
speculate on why La Giaconde is
smiling, or indeed whether she is smiling at all, and there is great artistic
skill in creating such ambiguity. But I am tired of her. She has been so
iconised, parodied, used as an image on tea-towels, postcards, advertisements,
posters and so forth that it now is impossible to look at her on her own
merits. And I never did think she was attractive anyway.
“Oh yes – her!” I said, as I
peered at the postage-stamp sized canvas behind the bullet-proof glass in the
huge gallery where she hangs. Let us admit that any appreciation of this painting
is minimised by the hordes of tourists over whose heads and shoulders you have
to look, and who always jostle about the painting in their hundreds because,
from Baedeker to Lonely Planet, Mona Lisa is the most publicised and hyped
exhibit in the palace. Let us also admit that she is probably a great painting,
but there is no way of telling that any longer because she can now be seen only
through the haze of received opinion. I found myself rapidly turning away from
her and taking more interest in Paul Veronese’s huge canvas of the wedding
feast at Cana, which faces her from the opposite wall.
But my visit to the Venus de Milo,
down in the rooms devoted to classical statuary, was something else.
For one thing, the Aphrodite of Milos
was in a less crowded gallery than the Italian lady. For another thing, she
stood high on her pedestal. You could wander around her unmolested, spend time
with her, take photographs of her from many angles, get clear views of her
without having to worry about some other visitor’s head getting in the way, and
generally be intimate with her.
True, she has been iconised
almost as much as the Mona Lisa. Inappropriate pop-cultural references popped
into my mind (they always do) as I looked at her. I thought of the witty 1920s
publicity shot of Buster Keaton pretending to be the Venus de Milo. My stupid
brain started playing bits from the antique pop-song “Love is Just Around the
Corner” (“Venus de Milo / Was well know
for her charms / But you’re much better than Venus / and what’s more you’ve got
arms!”). I told my stupid brain to desist and I was thankful for the
enlightened policy of the Louvre, which (unlike most art galleries; unlike the
National Gallery in London or the Vincent van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam) allows
tourists to take as many photos of the art works as they wish, so long as
flashes aren’t used.
So I spent time with a 2,200-year-old
statue. I walked around her slowly a number of times. I photographed her from
many angles. I felt as moved by her as the peasant who dug her up in 1820 must
have felt. And I tried to work out why I was moved. Surely it wasn’t simply
because this is such a famous statue and one feels obliged to admire such
certified High Culture? No. There was something about the very shape of her
that was exciting.
Consider the fortuitous lack of
arms. Just as ruins provide free play for the imagination, allowing us to fill
in the gaps of what is not there, so does the Venus de Milo’s lack of arms. We
can speculate (as many have done) on how her arms were originally posed before
the statue was broken by time. I know the tales that say she was once leaning
against a pillar, and in her right hand she held an apple – thus being Venus
caught at the moment when Paris made his judgement between the goddesses. But
any such imaginative reconstruction tends to diminish her. I follow my artistic
daughter-in-law’s intuition about ruins – that they enhance aesthetic appeal by
simplifying the lines of construction. Having no arms, the Venus de Milo allows
us to admire more her uprightness, her verticality. If, by some very unlikely
chance, her arms were to be rediscovered one day and properly attached to her,
I would be sorry. Her armlessness allows us to admire more fully her sides and
her torso and her oddly immature and undeveloped breasts. Arms would get in the
way.
The damage done to her right
shoulder worries me, and is as brutal as the holes where her arms once fitted.
Not all the work of time has enhanced her.
Looking at my photographs of the
Venus de Milo, my doctor-of-medicine daughter tells me that Venus’s stomach
muscles are structured like those of a young man rather than those of a young
woman. I would not have been able to make this judgment myself, but I do detect
an odd androgyny about parts of Venus – the small breasts, the stern and almost
masculine face despite the hair’s being arranged in classical Greek female
style. Even Wikipedia tells us that Auguste Renoir, who liked to portray buxom,
fleshy, almost Rubens-esque women, was deeply unimpressed by the upright,
small-breasted and stern Venus de Milo and dismissed her as “a big gendarme”.
I suppose I can see his point,
but surely a goddess, with powers of life and death over mere human beings, has
the right to look stern?
Besides, where her femininity is
concerned, I was reassured as I walked around her by the sight of her ample,
potentially child-bearing bum. But some doubt did creep in. Is it really as big
as a really good child-bearing bum? Maybe, as women go, it is a little on the
small side…
But there is another element of
the Venus de Milo that makes her speak. It is purely erotic. Please note that
the statue freezes her in mid-movement. Her left knee is advanced. Clearly she
is trying to keep up the drapery that covers her pudenda and legs. I am aware
that Hellenistic statuary routinely covered pudenda in drapery like this. Even
so, as any striptease artist knows, the moment that most excites male gazers is
the moment before full nakedness is
revealed. Remove all drapery and much of the excitement vanishes. Climax has
been reached and passed. Venus de Milo is promising the (male) viewer her naked
body. She is caught at the moment of making this offer, before her full
nakedness is revealed. If she were nude, if the drapery had fallen from her
pudenda, she would not be as exciting.
So I am caught by her simplicity
and her uprightness and her odd androgyny and her bum and her frankly erotic
appeal. This is a lot for a cold piece of marble, thousands of years old, to
convey. But Venus de Milo conveys all this.
Where she lives, there are other
goddesses whose conversational company I would probably enjoy more, and who are
probably more intelligent than Venus. Indeed, there are other goddesses with
whom I feel more kinship.
Artemis (Diana) the huntress,
only a few metres away from Venus, is a much more practical woman, caught in
mid-stride, poised to shoot off another arrow in the chase, and showing, by the
position of her left hand, her power over animals. Her beautiful nipples strain
against the cloth of her maidenish garb. She is a hockey-captain, a runner, the
pride of the school sports day. In her split-second pose, the full muscles on
her tensed right arm show that she is not to be messed with. She is quite
wonderful.
Also in the gallery, the serene,
tall, stately Athene (Minerva) and her wisdom, and her helmet of authority and
her upraised admonitory right arm, and her downright expository left arm, would
move me more if her lips and eyes were not discoloured in such a way as to make
her grotesque and somewhat scary when her face is seen close up. But her stance
is dignified and commanding and I am sure she would have many interesting
things to tell me.
I would happily applaud Artemis
as she won a race. I would enjoy a long coffee break while listening to Athene
set the world to rights. But Venus is the only one I would want to sleep with,
and somehow that must be part of her value as a work of art.
No comments:
Post a Comment