Untitled (Still life with a statuette of the Venus de Milo)

This work may have served as a training exercise for its photographer, John Beasley Greene, who learned the waxed-paper negative technique in Paris before traveling to Egypt to document archaeological discoveries. Statues were ideal subjects for students in the early days of the art: immobile, they were easy to capture even with the lengthy exposure times then required. In Greene’s time and place, Greek and Roman sculpture were held up as a model of aesthetic perfection, and the Venus de Milo was its exemplar. But this sculpture also attested to France’s rapacious collecting of ancient artifacts in the name of national glory. Greene’s modest study prompts thoughts on originality and reproduction; the sculpture pictured is not the marble one housed in the Musée du Louvre, but a miniature plaster copy, removed one step further from the original by Greene’s photographing it. For more on John Beasley Greene, see this blog post..