View from the North 40: Pauline and the strange and perfect beauty in imperfection

An Austrian tourist in Italy is facing the ire of museum officials and possible charges after damaging a 200-year-old plaster sculpture while taking a selfie with it at the Gipsoteca Museum in Possagno, Italy.

The unnamed culprit broke two toes off the Venus Victrix statue by Italian sculptor Antonio Canova. The Venus in this statue is actually Pauline Bonaparte, a sister to Napoleon Bonaparte. In her lifetime spanning from 1780 to 1825, Pauline was a celebrated beauty, which helps explain why the statue that is supposed to be the three-dimensional depiction of her is, instead, named after a Roman goddess.

The sculpture is also styled like classical Roman and Greek statues of women, which is to say that Pauline is depicted reclining on a lounge and spared complete nudity only by the sculpted cloth draped over her thighs. The Wikipedia entry on Venus Victrix says that nude portraits were unusual at the time for well-placed women like Pauline.

The Wiki entry goes on the say that the face seems to be a portrait of Pauline, but the body of the sculpture looks like women in the statues from the height and Greek and Roman sculpture when artists pretty much just used one body type for all beautiful women.

The connection between the Roman goddess of love and Pauline worked on another level, as well. She was married twice and faithful not even once. Pauline was a player, but she must’ve had an understanding with each husband because no one got upset, and she was liked and or loved and or respected by everyone.

She was variously described as having an “amiable character” and “extreme good-nature.” My favorite quote about Pauline, though, was written by poet Antoine Arnault who said, “(S)he had no principles and was likely to do the right thing only by caprice.” Which is to say that she did the right thing only on a whim or by accident. Several sources though, said she had far fewer dalliances than her reputation attributed to her.

She was, by most accounts, her own woman.

So here’s the thing about the big brouhaha over the broken off toes:

A) I get it. You don’t want every bumbling buffoon wandering among the museum exhibits to be climbing around on the precious artifacts like they’re common jungle gyms in a grade school play yard. One needs to discourage this behavior.

B) I also get it that the statue was damaged in a 1917 Christmas-time bombing. I mean really damaged —severed the head off and damaged parts of the hands, feet and cloth. The museum had to wait almost a hundred years before they could get around to restoration efforts to repair this damage in 2004. Then some random guy breaks the statue again 16 years later posing for a selfie of himself lying on the lounge next to Pauline. As if she would’ve had him in real life. Whatevs.

But C) Part of me says, hey, maybe we shouldn’t worry about the toes. When I was taking art history in college, the professor pointed at an image of the Venus de Milo — a marble statue from about 100 BC of Venus by a Greek artist — and declared the statue to be the depiction of the perfect woman. I in some confusion accidentally said out loud, “Really? Because she’s flat-chested and does not have any arms.”

I was assured — in a way that hinted I should keep my sarcasm chasm shut — that her proportions were ideal for the time and that the arms had been there originally, but were, somehow, damaged and lost at some point in the last 2,000 years. Furthermore, just because the arms are gone we should not judge this as a loss of beauty.

I guess I’m saying is that 1) considering my own, um, upper torso proportions, I should’ve been born 2,000 years ago, and 2) if Venus de Milo can be armless and still a vision of perfect beauty, Pauline, aka Venus Victrix, shouldn’t be worried about a couple toes.

——

We’re all beautiful in our own way, and in some era of humankind @ http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40.com.