VENUS OF MILO. The most celebrated and beautiful of surviving statues of the Greek god dess Aphrodite, and perhaps the most priceless treasure of the Louvre. It is named from the isle of lidos, in the -Egean Sea, where it was found by accident in 1820. Near it was dis covered the piece of an upper left arm, probably belonging to the statue, a hand with an apple, of inferior workmanship, and an inscription with the artist's name, now lost. The statue was purchased by the Marquis de Riviere, French ambassador to Constantinople. and presented to Louis XVIII, who gave it to the Louvre. It has suffered much from time and rough treat ment. Both arms are gone, and the bod y. which is nude to the waist, and the draperies, are much battered. But so chaste and noble is the ideal and so wonderful the technical execution, that the effect is incomparable to anything else in art. She is at the same time a woman of inde scribable youth and beauty and the majestic in carnation of all-powerful love.
The position of the goddess and the date of the origin of the statue are matters of dispute. The most likely explanation seems to he Flirt wiingler's that the advanced left foot rested upon a helmet and the goddess regarded 'herself in a shield supported on the left thigh. The statue was formerly ascribed to the age of Praxiteles, hut the prevailing opinion now is that it. belongs to the Hellenistic period, to the last half of the second or to the first century TLC. The sculptor has changed the type of the Aphrodite by Seopas to resemble the Melian Tyche, but under direct inspiration of the Phidian epoch. Numerous monographs and articles have been written on the subject; but the best discussion is by Furt witngler, .1/cisqcnrecke. 'ac yricehischen PlrrstiIc Leipzig-Berlin, 1893; Eng. trans., New York, 1895).