Venus de Milo

The Venus de Milo is a marble statue of a half-draped woman, a little over two metres tall, almost certainly representing Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. It was carved in the Hellenistic period, most likely in the second century BC, from fine Parian marble, and has been in the Louvre since 1821. The goddess stands with her weight on her right leg, her torso turning gently while heavy drapery slips down over her hips — a pose that looks calm at first glance but, the longer you look, reveals a complex spiral of angles.

The statue was found on 8 April 1820 by a farmer on the Aegean island of Milos, then part of the Ottoman Empire, with a French naval officer watching and encouraging the dig. French diplomats bought it, beating another buyer to the ship, and presented it to King Louis XVIII. Fragments found with it — part of an arm and a hand holding an apple — were long debated; analysis during the 2010 restoration supported the view that they belong to the statue, suggesting she once held an apple, the traditional attribute of Aphrodite as the winner of the judgement of Paris. A lost inscription found nearby may have named the sculptor as Alexandros of Antioch on the Maeander, but its link to the statue is disputed.

Nineteenth-century scholars first believed the Venus was a masterpiece of the fourth century BC, the classical high point, which helps explain her meteoric fame: she soon replaced the Medici Venus as the emblem of ideal beauty, inspired poets and painters, and became a favourite of the Surrealists. The Louvre deliberately left the missing arms unrestored, and the absence itself became part of the image. She has left France only once, for an exhibition in Japan in 1964, and was evacuated from Paris during both world wars.

Look closely and the statue tells its own story: the flesh polished smooth, chisel marks left elsewhere, the back finished less carefully, suggesting it was made to be seen from the front, perhaps in a niche. Her current room, where she has stood since 2010, displays the other sculptural fragments found with her.

Getting there

The Venus de Milo is on the ground floor of the Louvre's Sully wing, room 345. The museum stands on the Right Bank of the Seine in the 1st arrondissement at the heart of Paris; the nearest Métro stations are Palais Royal–Musée du Louvre and Louvre–Rivoli. Paris-Orly Airport (ORY) is about 15 km away.