Venus de Milo

Unearthed in 1820 by a farmer on the Aegean island of Melos, this marble Aphrodite - Venus to the Romans - has lost the arms that once completed her gesture; scholars still debate whether she held an apple, a mirror, or the drapery slipping from her hips. Carved in two blocks joined at the waist, she belongs to the late Hellenistic age, when Greek sculptors revived the balanced poise of earlier Classical art but loosened it into a more sensuous spiral. An inscription naming the sculptor, Alexandros of Antioch, was recorded when she was found and then mysteriously lost.