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

lining dismal streets thick with mud and putrid refuse. The forlorn souls who lived there were among the most wretched inhabitants of Paris, indeed of all France. Balzac described this “intimate alliance of squalor and splendor” in
Cousin Bette:
    These houses … lie wrapped in the perpetual shadow cast by the high galleries of the Louvre, blackened on this side by the north wind. The gloom, the silence, the glacial air, the hollow sunken ground level, combine to make these houses seem so many crypts, or living tombs. If, passing in a cab through this dead area, one happens to glance down the impasse du Doyenne, a chill strikes one’s heart, one wonders who can possibly live here and what may happen here at night, at the hourwhen the alley becomes a place of cut-throats, when the vices of Paris, shrouded in night’s mantle, move as they will.
    Although there had been plans under the ancien régime to transform the Louvre from an abandoned palace to a museum, they never really progressed. Then the Revolution came. The new government seized the property of both the king and the Catholic Church and found itself in possession of many priceless works of art. The Louvre was the natural place to display these treasures. After about a year of feverish renovations, it opened as a public museum on August 10, 1793, a date that was chosen because it was exactly one year after the fall of the monarchy. The paintings all hung in the Grande Galerie, which was lit by windows in the walls. On cloudy days it was too dark to see the paintings properly, while on sunny days it was too bright. And the paintings were hung neither chronologically nor by school but haphazardly high and low on the wall and pressed tightly together in every available space.
    TheTerror would begin just weeks later, but outside France the armies of the revolutionary government were having surprising success. French troops had just occupied Belgium, although it would require another six months to secure their hold. During the occupation, there was random pillage of the usual kind, but theConvention—the revolutionary government dominated by the extremists Danton and Robespierre—authorized systematic theft as well. In June 1794 the revolutionary government proposed “to send secretly after the armies educated citizens who would be charged with recognizing and having carefully transported the masterpieces found in the countries where our armies have penetrated.” Consequently experts in art arrived in the conquered land, bearing lists of the finest works and where to find them. They then went down the lists, looting the property of nobles and churches and sending their booty on to the Louvre. (Experts in books and manuscripts did the same for the national library. Botanists took plants for the former Gardenof the King, now the Museum of Natural History.) These thefts were described as war reparations, the price the conquered land must pay to the French for liberating them from the onerous weight of their kings and nobility.
    When the first shipment of art from Brussels arrived in Paris, a delegate to the rulingConvention announced why it was right to bring these treasures to France: “These immortal works are no longer in a foreign land: they are today deposited in the native land of arts and of genius, in the native land of liberty and of sainted equality, the homeland of the French Republic.” Art could flourish only in France because only France was free—as free as theancient Greeks. That made France also the rightful heir of the masterpieces of antiquity. Another speaker a few months later declared, “There is only we who are able to appreciate them [ancient statues] and we who can elevate them in temples worthy of them and their illustrious makers.”
    Winckelmann’s work, simplified and politicized, became the bedrock of the Revolution’s thinking about art. In October 1794, as theTerror faded after the execution of Robespierre three months earlier,