Gregory Curtis by Disarmed: The Story of the Venus De Milo

Author:Disarmed: The Story of the Venus De Milo
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Sculpture & Installation, Art, European
ISBN: 9780307483836
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2012-07-18T05:00:00+00:00

RAVAISSON was eighty-one in 1892 when he wrote his final paper on the statue. He lived for eight more years. He was lucid to the end, but his interests had returned to metaphysics. He retreated increasingly into his speculations, to the point that he couldn’t recognize his two adored granddaughters at first if they surprised him on the street as he returned home from his office. He still had his luminous blue eyes and dressed in bright colors, and his work in philosophy had influenced the next generation of French and German thinkers. As an archeologist, however, he had thought himself into irrelevance. His archeological papers were based on deduction from a few premises—the way a philosopher reasons—rather than on research and deduction from the proven facts, as a scientist reasons. In the end, his only permanent contributions to archeology are not his theories or his reconstructions but the important facts fate placed in his way: the wedges between the two halves of the Venus de Milo and Voutier’s sketches.

The future belonged to the next generation, specifically to Salomon Reinach in France and Adolf Furtwängler in Germany. Furtwängler had concluded his critique of Ravaisson’s paper by saying, “I must decline further comment on questions addressing the Venus de Milo itself, because an essay by me on the subject is currently on the press.” When that essay appeared a few months later, the future had arrived. Reinach responded with papers of his own, and classical archeology, once the domain of titled art connoisseurs and gentle philosophers, became a contact sport.

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