Venus de Milo

On April 8, 1820, Olivier Voutier, an ensign and keen amateur archaeologist from the French navy rowed ashore to explore the ancient theater of Milos. A farmer working in the fields nearby guided him to a recess in the wall where he saw the torso of a human figure carved in marble. Weighing 900 kilos and at 2.04 m (6 ft 7 in) tall, the Venus de Milo was reborn.

Appropriated for the Louvre, on arrival in Paris she was immediately hailed as a masterpiece by either Praxiteles or Phidias, the two great sculptors of classical Greece. Unfortunately, early drawings of the statue show that a broken fragment of the base that mysteriously went missing in Paris bore the inscription "Alexandros of Antioch," an obscure provincial sculptor. Some critics have ungraciously claimed that the statue is an inferior work of art, observing that she would not be famous if she had stayed in Greece or wasn't brachially challenged. To many, though, the Venus de Milo is much like her sister exhibit in the Louvre, the Mona Lisa: mystical, demure, serene, and one of the great figures of Western art.