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The Venus de Milo is a marble statue of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, found on 8 April 1820 by a farmer named Yorgos Kentrotas in a field on the Aegean island of Milos. She was carved in two pieces - the nude torso and the draped lower body - and joined with a vertical seam that is still visible today. Both arms are missing, lost before or during the statue’s discovery, and the question of what she once held has occupied scholars for two centuries.
The figure stands in a gentle contrapposto, her hips shifted and her drapery slipping, so that the body turns in a slow spiral. The head is turned to her left and the hair is gathered in a knot. The carving is unusually smooth and the marble is Parian, prized for its warm translucency. A plinth found with the statue carried the signature of a sculptor named Alexandros of Antioch, though whether he carved the figure or only the base remains disputed.
The Venus arrived in Paris at a moment of national self-consciousness about cultural prestige. France had recently lost the Venus de’ Medici to Italy, and the Louvre’s director, the Comte de Forbin, promoted the new discovery as a rival - even suppressing evidence that the statue might date from the Hellenistic period rather than the classical age of Praxiteles. The missing arms, far from diminishing her, have made her the most reproduced sculpture in the museum.
Alexandros of Antioch is known only from the inscription on the plinth of the Venus de Milo, which identifies him as the maker. Nothing else about his life or his workshop survives. He worked in the late Hellenistic period, when Greek sculptors were moving away from the serene idealism of the fifth century BC toward more sensuous, twisting and theatrical forms.
The statue was made on Milos, then part of the Greek world, at a time when Roman collectors were buying Greek sculpture in enormous quantities. It was probably displayed in a gymnasium or a sanctuary on the island. Rediscovered during the Greek War of Independence, it was bought by the French ambassador the Marquis de Riviere and presented to Louis XVIII, who gave it to the Louvre in 1821.
Sully Wing · Ground Floor · Greek Antiquities, Room 346
The Louvre is divided into three wings — Denon, Sully and Richelieu — reached from the hall beneath the glass pyramid.
Other pieces from the same artist, period or type of object.
