Vanished Venus

Vanished Venus

Bad luck. This Venus Pudica that I had set aside to speak of at leisure and that I had so admired in a corner of the museum, a sort of mezzanine between the Islamic Arts Department’s underground “cabinet of keys” (a designation that remains a mystery to me) and the Near Eastern funerary art—well! she’s gone (Denon, room 180, E 20501). In the past year that I’ve been a regular at the Louvre, an astonishing number of works I’ve chronicled have subsequently vanished. Since it isn’t to flout me, I simply conclude that the museum lives its life, moves, is never the same from one day to the next. Everything waltzes around, except the “Top Ten.” And even there, The Death of Sardanapalus has returned, dazzling with too many colors, but Liberty Leading the People has been taken down (Denon, room 700). What pleased me about this Venus from the Roman period, found at Antinoöpolis in the Middle Nile region (and what pleases me still, but only virtually), is the curve of the hips, the breadth of the pelvis, the slenderness of the shoulders, the smallness of the high breasts, and, of course, the hand that rests on the pudenda and calls to mind Montaigne’s praise of discretion, eliciting desire more than showing does: “There are some things we hide so as to reveal them.” This vanished Venus Pudica is all the more pleasant for it.