Carved in Stone

A recent visit to the Louvre got me thinking about my own attempts at stone sculpture in an adult education class long ago. The plethora of statuary in France and Rome gives one the impression that marble is like clay, easily shaped by artists with a talent for sculpture.

It is not.

 

Unless you’ve lived your life under a rock (haha) and without a television, you’ve no doubt heard of names like Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello and Leonardo da Vinci. And if you were a kid growing up in the 1990s, you at least know these fellows as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, named after a handful of the greatest Renaissance artists. There are so many more. The mostly forgotten fifth turtle was named Venus de Milo, the only character in the franchise named for a work of art rather than an artist, and the only female until much later.

 

A comedian once quipped, “How long is it polite to stand and stare at the Grand Canyon? It looks just like every postcard I’ve ever seen.” My experience in the Louvre, and later the Vatican Museum was similarly mind-numbing. Museums can be like that. As impressive as I found the armless Venus de Milo, prominently displayed by herself at the Louvre Museum, I was more amazed that I had traveled eight miles up in the sky at 600 miles per hour, reaching my destination in France in about seven hours. And there I stood, reading that not only is it unsure if the statue is a representation of Venus or Aphrodite, but that it is uncertain who sculpted her. But still, at night, when the lights in the Louvre are turned off, she stands alone in the dark, her marble likeness cold, hard, unable to speak and unappreciated for hours, every day for the foreseeable future. It was kind of sad. But that attributes human feelings to a lump of rock. That’s how good the sculpture is, and it was undoubtedly better when she had arms.

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