The Venus de Milo
Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s Louvre Highlights
Aphrodite, known as the Venus de Milo
A perfectly proportioned female figure standing two metres tall, with a face exactly three times the length of her nose and the famous ‘Greek profile’…too good to be true? Well, yes! Because this is the goddess of love and beauty, Aphrodite for the Greeks and Venus for the Romans, the mother of Eros (‘Cupid’ in Latin)... and above all, because she meets the aesthetic criteria of Greek art with her geometric proportions and divine, idealised beauty. The Venus de Milo found instant fame when she arrived at the Louvre in 1821, partly because of her grace and charm – but also because she is an original Greek sculpture, and very few have survived; most of the classical statues around her are Roman copies of long-lost Greek sculptures.
A modern muse
Artists began to copy the Venus de Milo in the 19th century. In the 20th and 21st centuries, they tended to pay her tribute in more provocative ways: Salvador Dali, for example, fitted his plaster copy of the Venus with drawers to represent secret areas of the subconscious mind; René Magritte painted her in three colours; Niki de Saint Phalle splattered her with paint from a rifle. And Beyoncé and Jay-Z? They simply posed in front of her.
